This was shortly thereafter followed by Katie telling us that she needed a new bed. Uh huh.
Well, maybe she did. The bed that was in her bedroom was the old queen-size bed that Gretchen and I had before getting the bed that we just replaced. Gretchen thinks that we bought that bed in 1995, shortly before we moved into this house, which is believable. So it would have gotten seven years of reasonably hard use before being consigned to the guest bedroom. There, it only got sporadic use until Katie took the bedroom about a year ago. Since then, it has gotten heavy use by a light girl. One who bounces on the bed.
However, there was the chance that this was simply a case of Mattress Envy (TM). So I pinged Jen, who was the most recent guest to use the bed, to get her opinion of the state of the mattress. After a bit of back and forth to determine exactly what I was asking, she confirmed that the mattress had definitely seen better days.
So tonight being the night before garbage day (when they will haul away exactly one mattress), Katie and I took the minivan over to Sam's Club where we had looked at mattresses last week. Katie sat on all the mattresses and we made a final decision -- which turned out to be to buy the cheapest mattress and also the one that she liked the best (among mattresses costing less than $1000, a figure that I thought to be just a bit high).
Now, I just needed to get the mattress home. I contemplated lashing it to the roof, then opened the hatch on the minivan, told Katie to go in and drop the backs on the middle seats (the rear seats already being stowed in the floor and safely out of the way), and started shoving mattress into the hatch. I had it about 2/3 of the way in before a helpful Sam's Club employee came out and helped me finish inserting the too large Mattress A into Van B. But the hatch closed and the mattress was only a little curved.
Home we went and I proceeded to pull the mattress out of the hatch where it looked like too many clowns trying to get out of a clown car. The mattress was transported into the house, the old mattress transported down to the curb, the new mattress transported upstairs (you know, this all would have been much easier with a transporter; I must invent one someday), and installed onto the old box spring.
And thus, victory was declared.
Of course, the bed still needs to be made. This is being left as an exercise for the 5th grade student.