North Shore Amour: The Time we Sawed Our Box Spring in Half

The second floor of our 1930 Sears kit house* was never intended to be an actual living space - it was originally an attic meant for storing skeletons and cobwebs and misbehaving children. Sometime over the years, the second floor was converted to two bedrooms and a bathroom, making extensive use of dormers. A dormer, as I understand it, is basically just popping out a piece of the roof to make a different roof so you can have a nice big square room instead of a sad little triangle room.

*Suspected. We haven't been able to 100% confirm.

Impressive artistic rendering

The upstairs bedrooms in our house are pretty large... It’s the staircase leading to them that is not. The staircase is made for tiny 1930’s people. It was most certainly not sized with 21st century furniture in mind.

During our move, with much grunting and sweating, the movers got our queen-sized mattress upstairs by folding it into a U shape and wedging it up the narrow opening. When it came to the box spring, the moving foreman looked at the door frame, looked at the box spring, then looked back at me and sadly shook his head. “Are you sure it won’t fit? Can’t you force it up there?” I asked.

No dice.

And that was that. The box spring spent the night in the garage. (Don’t worry, it was elevated so it wasn’t touching the ground.)

Over the course of the next week, Geoff and I slept with our mattress on the floor, like hippies, while we figured out what to do. We saw three options:

1) Buy something new. There are solutions you can buy: a split box spring (which is basically two box spring pieces that you fit under your one mattress), a platform bed (which you can assemble right in the room), or a pop-up box spring (which seems like a suspicious magic trick that could fail at the worst possible time, i.e., the middle of the night during a really good dream);

2) Find a way to get our existing box spring upstairs. The laws of physics meant that something was going to have to give - we’d either have to break the wall or break the box spring; or

3) Continue sleeping with the mattress directly on the floor, in perpetuity.

We really didn’t want to have to buy anything new. All of the solutions in option #1 were going to cost at least $100, maybe significantly more, and in general we try to use what we already have. We also really didn’t want to keep sleeping on the floor - it was too hot, and made me feel like a college student.

Which left option #2. We we would either break the wall or break the bed. We decided - quite bravely, I think - to try sawing the box spring in half.

This is the story of how we did it in six easy steps.

Step 1: Materials. We gathered our materials. We needed:

a) a saw;

b) some scissors;

c) wood boards to rebuild parts of the frame;

d) a drill;

e) heavy duty screws.

We also borrowed a staple gun from my parents, which Geoff proceeded to be silly with. North Shore gangster.

Disclaimer: Don't actually shoot staples this way.

Step 2: Alcohol. We had a drink. You know, for courage.

Step 3: Surgery. I used the scissors to cut the thin fabric on the bottom of the box spring (what is that stuff for, anyway?) I sliced it right down the middle and pulled it back a bit to give us access to the wooden innards. Geoff sawed the frame right down the middle. It made a huge mess and required much sweeping afterwards.