The Bed Rule I Keep Breaking
At some point around two in the morning I woke up with Rowan’s spine pressed along the back of my knees and Mabel sitting upright on my chest, staring at the door with the intensity of an animal who has heard something in the walls. I could not move either leg. I lay there doing the arithmetic on how I had gotten here, given that when I brought the bed home I had a rule, and the rule was that nobody with four legs would be on it.
The rule lasted eleven nights
I know it was eleven because I remember which week it was. Rowan spent those nights on a mat beside the bed and spent a good part of each one sighing in a way that I am fairly sure was editorial. On the twelfth night there was a storm, and he came up, and I let him, and that was the end of the policy.
What I find interesting now is how quickly I converted from a person with a rule to a person with an arrangement. Within a month I was sleeping diagonally to accommodate a dog. Within three I had stopped noticing that I was doing it. I do not present this as a recommendation. Plenty of people hold the line successfully and their bedrooms are better for it. I am just describing what happened in mine.
What the mattress looks like two years in
Honest answer, better than I expected, with one caveat. There is a compressed channel along the lower right side of the mattress where Rowan sleeps every night, and it does not spring back the way the rest of the surface does. It is not a valley, but you can feel the edge of it with a hand.
Nails have not been the issue I braced for, mostly because a mattress surface is soft enough that a nail sinks in rather than catching. What has been an issue is heat and hair. The layer directly under my sheets holds warmth from a dog who sleeps there for eight hours, and hair works its way through the weave of a fitted sheet and settles into the quilted top of the mattress, where it stays. I vacuum the bare mattress when I change the sheets, and there is always more than seems reasonable.
The upholstered headboard was the real mistake
If I could reverse one purchase in this house it would be the headboard. I bought a tall padded one in a light woven fabric because I liked how it looked against the wall, and it has been the single worst performing object I own.
Mabel sleeps on the top edge of it. That is a two inch wide ledge about five feet off the floor with a view of the whole room, so of course she does. Getting up there involves the front face of the headboard, and the front face of the headboard has taken the consequences. There are vertical scuff lines in the fabric near the left post, the nap has gone matte in an arc where she pushes off, and the top edge has picked up an oil mark that no amount of careful blotting has moved. It is not removable and it is not washable, which are two questions I never thought to ask in the store. A wooden or metal headboard would have shrugged all of this off.
Bedding is the only part I still control
Since I lost the argument about who sleeps on the bed, I have concentrated on the one layer I can actually manage. Everything on that bed is washable and there is a duplicate set of it in the closet, so stripping the whole thing at eleven at night is a fifteen minute job rather than a crisis.
The layer that does the real work is a plain quilted coverlet that goes over the sheets and comes off before I get in. It takes the hair, the paw prints from a dog who came in off a damp lawn, and one memorable incident involving a mouse. When it is dirty it goes in a machine. It is the cheapest thing in the room and it is the reason the expensive things in the room are still acceptable.
Bed height became a furniture problem
The part I did not anticipate at all was the getting down. My bed sits high, which I liked, and Rowan leaves it at speed, usually because someone has knocked or a car door has closed outside. The sound of the landing on a hardwood floor is not a sound I enjoy.
So there is now a low upholstered bench along that side of the bed, positioned as a step rather than as decoration. He uses it going up more reliably than coming down, which is the opposite of what I wanted, but the floor beside the bed is at least no longer bare. If I were furnishing this room again from scratch I would choose a lower platform bed and skip the problem entirely, which is a strange thing to conclude about a bedroom, but that is where two years of observation has left me.
Where I have landed
The bed is shared. The mattress has a channel in it, the headboard is visibly worn on one side, and the coverlet is in the wash more often than any other textile in the house. In exchange I have a dog against my knees and a cat on my chest at two in the morning, which on the nights I am honest with myself is not a bad trade at all.
What I would change is the furniture, not the arrangement. Hard headboard, lower frame, washable everything on top. Those are decisions I could have made at purchase for the same money, and I made them badly because I was picturing a bedroom with one occupant in it.
