So… this boat has been sitting, all closed up, in the Florida heat and humidity for at least 2 years… *with* a leak.  Needless to say, everything made of fabric was pretty darn gross.  This, unfortunately, included both mattresses.  Luckily (?) they weren’t fancy expensive mattresses, so I had always planned on replacing them with memory foam of some kind.  Upon further research, I found that memory foam doesn’t breathe well and can sleep “hot” to a lot of people.  Since our plan is warm tropical locations, it was worthwhile to avoid that.  Apparently latex foam is resistant to mold and mildew and will sleep the coolest out of all of the “foam” materials.  Jason and I had a latex mattress many years ago and loved how comfortable it was.  That made our decision pretty easy!

We’ve been sleeping on the first one we ordered like a month ago (it’s just laying on the floor because we’re classy folk) and I finally got around to getting the old mattress pieces off of the boat, throwing away the nasty foam, and washing the covers (twice!).  All I have to do now is to hack a brand new foam mattress into a few pieces… excellent.

I had dimensions that I measured on the boat that I compared to the dimensions of the existing mattress cover pieces.  The covers were a few inches smaller all around than the actual measurements, but I figured that the mattress would just fit tight and it would be fine.  I used a cheap electric carving knife to cut the foam.  It worked fantastic and didn’t really even leave that much foam dust laying around!

The bed platform is hinged so you can get to the storage underneath, so the mattress is in two pieces at that point.

So that’s it! It took maybe a few hours of work (with breaks) to actually get this done for the master bedroom.  So that’s what accomplishment feels like! 😮

The guest mattress was originally going to be replaced with a cheaper memory foam mattress, but those were only slightly cheaper than the same nice latex mattress we bought for our room.  So it gets one also! I measured the guest bed area the other day and came to the depressing realization that not a single one of the edges in there is square, so it was going to be a pain in the ass to measure and cut accurately.  I bought a roll of brown landscaping paper from Home Depot and made myself a gigantic template.

A large heavy box full of compressed mattress was what arrived around lunchtime when we were on the boat.  I even wrestled it onto the bed by myself while Jason was out shopping for fishing line.

As much as I dislike the blue covers that we had, they’re at least in good shape and usable. (keeps me from having yet another expensive and time consuming sewing project…) The guest mattress on the other hand… is completely disgusting.  It looks like it just got dripped on for years and is covered in mold and suspicious stains. As soon as I use it for sizing it’s going in the dumpster. I’m NOT saving those covers! ::barf::

I only brought the cushions home so I could make sure the sizing works, but the white ones are too misshapen to really be of any use to me. I guess I’ll just have to wing it.  On the plus side it’s going to look *amazing* in comparison!

I think we actually made a lot of progress today! It’s been a while since I feel like we’ve actually gotten a lot done instead of being thwarted by needing parts.  The rain gave me a good excuse to actually get the mattress thing done.  Since it’s supposed to rain all week, I’m hoping to get most of my indoor projects finished!