The new mattress

We're supposed to be getting our new mattress today. It's being delivered by truck to the house, sometime between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. So we have to be on the lookout for it all day... until it arrives. We ordered it from Amazon France and it's coming from a company in Brittany called Home Avenue (pardon my French!).

The reason this is such a big event for us is that our old king-size mattress is one that we bought in California in about 1995. So it's pretty ancient. We had it shipped to France in 2003 when we moved here from San Francisco. It's an Eastern king mattress, which means it's not exactly the same size as a California king-size mattress. We bought an Eastern king mattress in California because we already had a king-size platform bed. We had bought it in 1983 when we lived in Washington DC. The bed-frame is modular so it's easy to take apart, move, and put back together. It measures, if we've measured it accurately, 200 cm wide x 203 cm long. It's a very big bed. The old mattress itself measures 193 cm wide by 202 cm long. The new mattress is just as thick (25 cm) as the old one.

If you want to see how complicated all this can get, have a look at this Wikipedia page on mattress sizes in different countries. Here's an excerpt:

...a King size bed may measure (in width by length):

• 150 cm × 200 cm (59 in × 79 in) in the UK.
• 165 cm × 203 cm (65 in × 80 in) in New Zealand.
• 180 cm × 190 cm (71 in × 75 in) in Portugal, but is also available in 195 and 200 cm (77 and 79 in) lengths.
• 180 cm × 200 cm (71 in × 79 in) in Indonesia.
• 183 cm × 191 cm (72 in × 75 in) in Singapore and Malaysia.
• 183 cm × 203 cm (72 in × 80 in) in Australia.
• 183 cm × 216 cm (72 in × 85 in) in India.
• 193 cm × 202 cm (76 in × 80 in) in the US.

The mattress we've ordered is supposed to measure 200 cm x 200 cm — that's slightly more than 6½ feet by 6½ feet — so we are optimistic that it will fit the platform bed in width as well as in length. If it doesn't fit, I don't know what we'll do. How will we ever be able to return it to the vendor? The old mattress is still in pretty good shape, but it really needs to be replaced. We've been worrying about the problem for more than a decade, because we have never been able to find an American Eastern king-size mattress in France up until now. We've considered getting two single mattresses for the bed — that's what we had between 1983 and 1995, and it was fine. The problem is that French single-bed mattresses are narrow (just 90 cm wide) so two of them together, at 180 cm, wouldn't be wide enough and might slide around on the platform bed.

The new mattress in a photo I grabbed off the Amazon France site.

A couple of years ago, I started looking into companies that sell custom-made mattresses. You can order the size or sizes you want. We could have ordered two 100 cm-wide mattresses, or one that was 200 cm wide, or better, a 195 cm-wide mattress. That would fit easily. But custom-made mattresses didn't fit my idea of what I should have to pay for a new mattress. The cost would have been well over two thousand euros. Other options, like getting rid of the old platform and "downsizing" to a standard-width French bed would cost a lot less.

Another Amazon France photo — this is not our king-size bed.

We also tried to find a king-size mattress through U.K. companies, but had no luck. A British king size bed is about the size of an American queen-size bed, and what is called a super-king over there is still smaller than our platform bed. It was only when it dawned on me that I should check Amazon Germany that I suddenly found a range of 200x200 mattresses. Then I looked a Amazon France again and voilà — there they were, and at a quarter of the price of the custom-made mattresses. We've also ordered a new mattress pad (un protège-matelas) and a couple of fitted sheets for the new mattress. We have plenty of flat king-size sheets that will work with the bigger mattress, but our current fitted sheets will be too small.

Fitted 200x200 sheets sold by one vendor on Amazon France.

So wish us luck. We won't be getting rid of our old American mattress right away, because if we really don't like the new one we'll want to put the old one back on the bed. I think we'll be able to store it in the garage until we're sure we're ready to part with it. I'll update all this in a couple of days.