One of us bought four single bed frames in the last six years. She finds that wholly unsurprising. The other bought exactly one – back in 2019 – and still doesn’t understand why we keep buying more. Isn’t one enough? Single beds aren’t supposed to be collections. They’re furniture.
Yet both of us are right.
Always.
It’s actually the problem with this purchase.
Here’s what no one tells you about single beds: they are never just for one person. Or for one use. Or one decade of your life. They start as children’s beds and end up as dog beds. They’re first your child’s bed, then the guest bed, then the thing your mum brings round so her cat can sleep on it more than anyone ever will, before being banished to the box room and decorated around to look like “part of a reading nook” by someone who has never read in it. We’ve seen the same bed frame do all four of those stages in the same house.
We keep buying them because they’re impossible to get right. You can buy a doddle of a double bed frame. Nobody inspects the joinery on a double bed at 3am holding a spirit level and an impending Breakup Chat with you partners. But a single bed bears more love than any other piece of furniture, we think, because it’s where small children catapult themselves onto regardless of the time, it’s where your teenager plants their feet when they’re too big for the bed but not yet allowed a desk, and it’s where your perfectly-fitting adult guests sleep uncomfortably once a year and judge your mattresses silently. Who is ever going to repair these scenarios overnight?
One of us will happily evangelise about the cloud-like superiority of a solid framed bed with a headboard you could store a buffet against. The other has only ever bought slatted beds in the last ten years and isn’t having a word said against the drying properties of slatted bases. Both beds collapsed within months of these conversations starting. Beds. Collapsed. You can’t convince the other when facts are so blatantly interfering.
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What unites us is this: buy it heavy. Like, ridiculously heavy. The single beds we regret were always the ones that looked just lightweight enough in the store to make sense. Sure, they were small and would fit up your stupid spiral staircase! But they also wander themselves across your carpet every time your toddler sits on the bed to change their trousers. Ask us how we know. One of our walls actually has dent marks from where we lived too cheerfully under budget on a frame simply because it was £40 cheaper. It did not, £40 there or anywhere else, pay for itself.
We’re also irreconcilably split over drawers. Forever.
One of us believes having drawers built into the base of your child’s bed is the best use of dead space under any piece of furniture in a small home.
Another refuses to look at a bed with drawers ever again, because guess where all your crap ends up when you move house?
Right. Under thebed. And someone’s going to unload that bag months from now and it will be your problem again.
So we buy more beds. Different ones. Ones for separate rooms. Ones that our quickly-growing children will undoubtedly outgrow in different amounts of time. And we’ll never agree on the right kind again. We’ve accepted that, finally.
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