Bedlam!

So we've been sleeping for the last year on a Jell-O-filled mattress that was older than Michael Jackson's third nose. It featured one of those headboardless collapsible roll-away frames, which gave our carefully painted bedroom that living-under-the-highway aesthetic that lends all those Law & Order episodes their shocking verisimilitude. And since our bedroom is about as big as Paris Hilton's common sense, the bed's vast kingsiziness was wedged tightly into a corner. Which meant that one of us always had to enter the bed from the foot instead of the side. Which meant we could never tuck in our sheets. And if you can't tuck in your sheets, why the hell should you make the bed in the first place—am I right? Unfortunately, that attitude always led us to this:

But! We recently got a pretty fat check from our escrow account, and instead of investing it back into our mortgage, we decided to invest it in some adult bedroom furniture. Some queen-size bedroom furniture so our house would stop looking like a storage locker. We spend a great deal of time watching TV from our bed, so we wanted something with a padded headboard. And we have closets the size of mouse underpants, so we wanted a bed with built-in storage. So a few clicks on the Internet later—along with two separate delivery trucks, assembly instructions written by a chemically dependent toddler, a special trip to a faraway hardware store and a whole morning of industrial-strength swearing—we are now the proud owners of this:

But the magic doesn't stop there! The mattress is actually on a hydraulic platform, which means we can store thousands of blankets and towels and pillows and Jimmy Hoffa in a place where we can see everything at a glance. Plus, it gave us something totally cool for show-and-tell at last weekend's housewarming party:
Of course, a new size mattress requires a new mattress pad and new sheets. Lord knows how much I hate to shop, but I bravely went out with my credit cards anyway and came back with a splurge of financially impressive proportions: a set of 800-count cotton sheets that are so soft and so cozy and so freakishly nice to snuggle up in that I may never be able to leave our bed. So the jury's still out on how I'm going to get to work to pay for them ... much less our cute little bedside tables and matching lamps:
Best of all, the shopping's still not done! As you can see, my blue alarm clock clashes mightily with our new bedroom set, so I have to go out this weekend to find a new one in tasteful shades of green and chocolate and gold. Plus, my nephew's birthday is on Wednesday and he wants Guitar Hero and something involving rabbits for his new Wii. And we totally need a plunger, but that's probably too much information. Bad touch!

I'm also buying little jars of paint samples for our next project: Operation No More Yellow Hallway. Stay tuned for all the pictures!