New Bed!

Woo hoo! We got a new bed!

We have been sleeping on the original double futon that we got on our first day in Japan. If you've been reading the blog for a while, you know that we have been battling mildew and mold for the full two years. We have had the futon directly on the floor - which is fine if you have a traditional room with tatami mat flooring, but not so fine if you have laminate - which is what we have. Every morning for 9 months out of the year, the bottom of our bed was soaked through with condensation.

We had several strategies for battling this. At first, we tried to prop the bed up every morning and let it dry out. That sort of worked, but didn't always get it fully dry. At some point we got lazy and just started flipping the bed over every day so the wet side could get some air. On sunny days, we tried to hang it outside (a highly recommended strategy for both drying the bed and zapping any mold spores with UV light.) Unfortunately, we rarely got around to hanging the bed out more than once a week, and often lapsed longer than that.

Around this time last year, our bed was showing definite mold spots and started to smell bad. I wanted to dump it and get a new bed, but Russell didn't want to figure out how to dispose of the first one and didn't want to spend the money on the new one. Instead, he decided to bleach the bed. One day while I was at work, he put the bed in the bathtub with hot water and bleach. He then hung it out on the back porch to dry. It took about a week to dry sufficiently because it was the middle of winter, but it did get relatively dry. To finish the job, we decided to buy a futon dryer. It consists of a nylon bag attached to a hot air blower. You put the bag in your bed, turn on the hot air and it pushes hot air through the bed until its dry. It worked very well.

SInce then, we have been trying to flip the bed every day and dry it out with the dryer. We occasionally missed a day, but we did pretty well. The problem was that one side of the bed was always face down and the room itself was often dark. Eventually, the mold came back. It had gotten so bad that our bedroom smelled strongly of mildew. It was grossing me out, so I decided to use my winter break to take care of the problem once and for all.

I pulled everything out of the bedroom, washed bedding, washed the walls and floors with a bleach solution, cleaned out all the window tracks and washed the windows, everything. Unfortunately, the bed was clearly moldy again. I banished it to the patio, set out our guest futons as temporary bedding, and went searching on Amazon.

After a little searching, I found some wooden slats that could be rolled out as a very slight lift to get a futon off the floor. They were, of course, designed for exactly our problem. In the cart they went. Then, I looked for a nice futon. There were several cheap ones, and there was also a nice big fat one. I showed everything to Russell, we agreed that the fat one would make sleeping on slats more comfortable, so I placed the order and we waited.

We got a message later that day that the color of futon I wanted was out of stock, which took us a while to decode. Finally, we figured out what the problem was and agreed to take another color (this is all in Japanese, of course, so we're a bit slow).

Last Friday, the futon arrived. The slats still hadn't come, so we just put the futon out as it was. The next morning, the bottom had standing droplets of water on it when I lifted it. I propped it up under our heater and made sure it dried out. The next day was the same. Finally, the slats arrived. I set everything up, we went to bed, and the next morning? No water! The bed wasn't even damp with the exception of a small strip at the very top that had sagged down off the slats and touched the floor.

Success!

Hopefully we will be able to enjoy THIS bed for a long time to come with no fear of mold.