I’m in the process of making my own latex bed, and it’s far enough along that I’d like to share my experience with everyone here.
For information about where I bought my foam and my experiences with the companies and the quality of the foam, I posted some of that here: Foam ordering details.
First I’d like to show you guys what really drove me to get a new bed. I started with a bedinabox.com Pacbed 11" with gel. This is an image of my spine while lying on this bed. You can see that all of the curve is in one area of my lower back. I had never had lower back pain from sleeping until this bed, but this was excruciating. It’s worth mentioning that although the bed wasn’t for me, these guys have the BEST customer service. I would highly recommend the company. I contacted them about a half dozen times during the return process, and they answered every email within hours and I never waited on hold to talk to someone.
Cost: $849.00
After this, I followed Phoenix’s advice and checked out the local bed companies, and found a lot of nice beds, but generally everything I liked was well over 2k, and you can’t really change it latter on. Despite Phoenix’s good advice not to, I decided to build my own bed. I really just wanted more control over the end result.
This picture is of my bedinabox.com bed with the 3" 22-24 ILD latex topper from Natural Comfort. For the life of me, I can’t explain the huge difference in shoulder height. What I can say is that the back pain stopped. You can see that even though my shoulders are epically higher, the curve in my spine is much more gradual. I slept on this configuration for about 2 weeks, and it was good enough.
This picture is the first configuration of my fully built bed. I started with a 5", 1.8 density, 36 ILD polyfoam base that I got from foamcenter.com. I can’t stress this enough, look at my post about the foam if you want to order from these guys. Next I have a 3", 30-32 ILD piece of latex I got from mattresses247 acting as my intermediate layer. On top of that, I have my Natural Comfort, 3" 22-24 ILD latex. Much better spinal alignment. Unfortunately, the base and intermediate layers were just too firm and we could seriously feel it through the comfort layer.
Cost at this point: $940.11
We were satisfied with the comfort of the 3" 22-24 ILD piece, so we ordered a 2", 21 ILD piece of foam from latexmattresscompany.com. It didn’t help with my spinal alignment, but it took the edge off the base and intermediate layers. At this point, it looks like if I can sink my shoulders by 2 - 3 inches, it would be perfect.
Cost at this point: $1188.16
What I ended up doing was ordering some 1.1 density, 15 ILD polyfoam from nagusupholsterysupplies.com. What I did was cut out a 40" x 33" piece out from the intermediate layer, and put this low ILD foam in there. Eventually I will probably replace this with latex, but for testing this was much more affordable. If anything, it looks like this had a negative impact on my spinal alignment. I will probably shorten the low ILD length, putting more support underneath my lower chest. You can see that my lower backs alignment is pretty good though. I am pretty satisfied so far, but it needs work.
Cost at this point: $1276.18 (not including 30 dollars in tools, just the foam)
This is a photo of foam layer squishing with me laying on the edge.
This is the final product.
