(About my life, and home furnishings. A bit of gay interest, a bit about language.)
On Wednesday, a couple of guys came for my bed, a low teak number with a very wide — like, 9-foot — headboard and a thin futon mattress. On Friday, yesterday, some other guys brought me a new one, a high dark-stained number with an ordinary queen-sized headboard and a thick firm conventional mattress.
Details follow, mostly about the new bed. (Local photos by Kim Darnell, who supervised the bed replacement activities.)
But first: what was removed.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
(#1) The old bed, sporting the queer quilt
Nice though it was, it was only about 16″ off the floor, not an easy height for someone with many arthritic joints. (Oh yes, that’s a stuffed mammoth between the pillows.)
(You’ll also notice the pile of books under the built-in side table on the left. Those books were, in fact, holding up the side tables and, in consequence, the whole bed, which otherwise would have been inclined to cant forward and collapse. Things wear out.)
Then: the great bedroom void. After the services of the Got Junk? guys and a lot of energetic cleaning, on Wednesday:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
(#2)
And then the revival. The new bed, in stages.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
(#3) Stage 1, featuring the new mattress (and the side lamps mounted on the wall)
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
(#4) Stage 2: with sheets (Egyptian cotton, in lilac) and the shirtless cowboy mounted on woolly mammoth blanket
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
(#5) Stage 3, with the queer quilt on top
The ingredients. First, the Riva platform bed, rectngular and dark brown, with four rectangular cutouts in the headboard. Here’s a basic Riva with lateral slats in place:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
(#6)
On top of the slats comes a bunkie board. From the Furniture.com site:
What is a Bunkie Board? A bunkie board, also spelled bunky board or Bunkie-board [the name is derived from bunk bed], is a thin platform [in my case, of plywood] commonly used to support a mattress in a daybed, platform bed, bunk bed, or trundle mattress. Bunkie boards provide adequate support in lieu of bulky box-springs. These supportive boards reduce the total height of the sleep set and are often used when space is an issue. The thinnest foundation possible, bunkie boards offer even lower foundational support than low-profile box-springs.
… Demand for the foundation type has risen with the popularity of the platform bed because the board supports a floating, low-profile look. Though commonly used with twin mattresses, bunkie boards can be used with full, queen, and king mattress sizes as well. Bunkie boards are also popularly used with platform beds and foam and latex mattresses. Bed frames with lateral slats on the base can dig into foam mattresses and wear away materials. Bunkie Boards can provide extra support and prolong the life spans of beds.
Then you add a mattress, in this case:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
(#7) Serta Sunview 13″ firm, shown here on a base
(The straps on the side are for moving the mattress.)
A 13″ mattress requires something more sizable than your ordinary bottom sheet. What you need is called in the trade a deep pocket sheet. My sheets have deep pockets. They are weighty (800 count). And they are lilac. (Lavender, magenta, and purple were other possibilities.)
My Riva frame comes with storage drawers, two on each side, as here:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
(#8) King Riva — mine’s a queen — with storage drawers
The result is a bed surface that’s a bit under 30″ off the floor — perfect for achy aged Arnold.
In the showboxes. Go back to #5 and look at the rectangular boxes in the Riva headboard. They’ve all been filled, mostly with images I’ve collected over the years. But at the left end, there’s a pair of small stuffed mammoths, a larger one riding on top of the headboard, a smaller one filling the second box. In my very inexpert photo:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
(#9) Mammuthus Major and Mammuthus Minor, at home
The three images in the showboxes: “The Primeval Hunting Party” (as I’ll call it), an artist’s rendering (source now lost to me) of prehistoric humans hunting down a mammoth (presumably a Columbian mammoth, Mammuthus columbi):
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
(#10) Savage days in box 1
Then “Shirtless Shore Leave” (as I’ll call it), a photograph (source again lost to me) depicting a young naval couple:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
(#11) The boys in box 3
And finally, an Edward Hopper painting (Western Motel) that I’ve defaced with a caption of mine, to make a composition I think of as “Arnold Hopper”:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
(#12) The gaze direct in box 4