Broken Bed

If you say you broke the bed, and you're over the age where you're likely to have been jumping on it, it is usually assumed there was a wild night with your significant other. Not me. I broke the bed all by myself, Hubby's out of town. I was reaching for the Kleenex box that fell off the nightstand.

I was trying to get to bed early. For me, 11:00 pm is early. And the harder I try to go to bed early-ish, the more likely I am to be stalled by emergency phone calls, or woken up by vomiting dogs or crying children. Last night I had really made an effort to get to bed early, I had left the movie I was watching half finished, and gone to bed. After I reached for a Kleenex and knocked the box on the floor, I reached for it and the bed snapped.
So I dragged the mattress off to one side so I could get the box springs up high enough to assess the damage.

Our bed doesn't have the traditional metal rails along the sides, it has wood sides, with a little wood shelfy thing on the inside that holds the slats that hold the box springs. The shelfy thing is what broke.



I figured sleeping on it that way would probably make it worse. It was bad enough already that I just couldn't put it back together and go to bed. I wanted a better look. So I heaved the mattress and the box springs all the way off the frame. I wedged the mattress between the foot of the bed and the closets, and the box spring is balanced on its end in front of the window. Ours is not a very big bedroom, finding space for a queen sized mattress on the floor was like fitting a square peg in a round hole. I tugged and pulled until the mattress was flat, then slept on the mattress on the floor last night. Of course all this drama shot my hopes for going to bed early-ish. It was nearly midnight before I got the mattress flat.

Apparently the part of the bed frame that broke was held on by wood glue and a couple dozen of the thinnest, tiniest little nails you could imagine. They're pretty long, but just slightly bigger around than a pin. There was no way I was going to be able to dig them out of the shelfy board thing and use them again, so this afternoon I snipped the bent and protruding sharp ends with the wire cutter part of a pair of needle nose pliers. Snipped them EASILY, I might add. I glued the shelfy thing back on and drilled some holes for some serious screws. I figured it couldn't hurt to let the glue dry all night, and I'll put the bed back together tomorrow.