After spending the last few weeks thoroughly browsing these forums, which have been beyond helpful, I made the decision to purchase a new mattress. I’m moving up from my old ‘college quality’ twin innerspring bed to a hopefully long lasting & high quality queen memory foam bed. A bit about me: I’m a male, in my mid 20s, about 5’7" tall and weigh around 130lbs.
I try to save money where I can, but when it comes to things I use on a daily basis (computers, bicycles, mattresses), I tend to splurge. For this reason I was simply going to buy a Tempurpedic and not even consider other mattresses. But then I found this community and realized that if I designated an hour each day for a couple weeks, I might be able to get a better deal on a better mattress. And that is what I did; that is what I typically do on expensive daily-use purchases. Lots of research. I became familiar with materials, densities, thicknesses, etcetera. I learned and knew more than any mattress salesmen I met at the various retailers (ex. Mattress Firm) and furniture stores. It got to the point where, while I was testing the various mattresses to determine my firmness preference, I would listen to salesman pitches and laugh (on the inside) because they said the very same ignorant things you guys pointed out here.
Although I live in Galveston Texas, I decided to check out the mattress stores that Phoenix pointed out in Houston. As a couple of other people have mentioned, the Houston Mattress Factory looks pretty pathetic on the outside. Worse is the fact that all the mattresses in their “showroom” had plastic wrap on them. Another disappointment was they didn’t have any of the higher density topped memory foam beds on display. Fortunately I tried many beds elsewhere and had a pretty good idea of what I wanted.
I spent about two hours chatting with Michael, the owner, on topics covering his company’s history, quality of his products, and mattresses offered by other companies (he gave me a very fair analysis of other manufacturers). Overall I was impressed with his knowledge, the very few ‘sale’s pitch’ vibes I got from him, and the time he took to chat with me. Taking 2 whole hours to talk to me for a single sale (instead of manage his company) is pretty impressive to me. And the fact that their warranty is extremely impressive… These things really won me over, despite the negatives I mentioned earlier.
Now, I could be making a terrible decision to have him build a custom mattress for me when I am no mattress expert, but I feel pretty confident with his input (and the information on these forums) that I’ll be alright. Here’s what I’m getting:
Support: 4 inches of High Resiliency 2.5lbs polyfoam with a 4x4 perimeter rail (firm foam) for sitting on the side of the mattress and for easier transporting of the mattress.
Middle: 2 and 3/4 inches of 5.3lbs visco foam.
Top: 1 and 1/4 inches of 4.5lbs gel foam.
I believe the Tempur Contour by comparison is: 6in of 1.8lbs support, 2.8in of 5lbs middle, and 1.2in of 5lbs top.
I’m hoping my mattress feels somewhat like a mix between the Tempurpedic Cloud and Contour. Because I’m a relatively small guy, I ‘hope’ I am able to use less thickness materials (and therefore better quality for the same price because I use less). Again, I could be completely wrong. But that is where their awesome warranty comes in! Only time will tell. I get my mattress in about a week. It takes a little longer than normal because I requested a smaller than average bamboo mattress cover, which he has to special order. However, he promised to air out my mattress a little longer than normal over a fan while waiting for the cover (to reduce offgassing). The total price was around $1,050. The Tempurpedic mattress would have been twice that with similar (maybe even slightly less quality) materials.
I thank you all for the valuable posts on this forum. HUGE help. I’ll update you when the mattress arrives and over time as I use it. Sorry for the novel.
