Heretofore Unacknowledged Decorating Genius!

I might be a decorating genius!  Here’s the back story:  The Man and I inherited an ancient mattress many, many years ago.  It was already very old when it took up residence with us.  But it worked, the price was right ($0), and it was actually quite comfortable.  I remember lying in our bed thinking, “Boy this is a cozy bed” until the herniated disk thing happened.   The soft mattress that was once so inviting now made the bed feel like a torture rack.  Firmness was what was needed!  So we bought a new mattress set and passed the soft cuddly mattress on to one of our boys.  That was nine or ten years ago.

That old mattress came to my attention again when recently  taking on the Herculean task of swapping the furniture in Josh’s room with the stuff in the sewing room.  Josh’s bed frame had to be dismantled to make it out the door.   Off came the comforter and the sheets and the mattress cover and the foam topper.  And there was that old mattress.  The ticking was torn and the padding underneath was matted and flat.  It looked like a cast off from  a 1940’s flop house.  It was time to say goodbye.  Somehow I got that heavy thing to the top of the stairs and with one mighty heave, down it went.  It lay in a heap at  the bottom, so I crawled over it and grabbed hold where I could (the built-in cloth handles were long gone) and managed to drag it through the entry hall and into the living room.  It looked even more pathetic lying there.  

When The Man came home and saw it on the living room floor, the protestations began.  The usual comments were made about me “getting up a head of steam” and “how are we going to get that out of here”, and blah, blah, blah, so I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll just cut it up and put it out into the garbage.”  So while The Man was at work, that’s exactly what I did.  As I hacked away at the mattress carcass, I tried not to think of all the dead skin cells and other nastiness that was undoubtedly swirling around in the air and being sucked into my lungs.  It took 7 large yard bags to contain all the pieces. 

 

By the time all the ticking and batting and hayish-looking stuff was stripped away and bagged, all that was left were some springs.  They would have to be taken to the “transfer station” to be recycled, so got propped against the side of the garage for the time being.  

As I looked at them, however, I noticed that they were actually pretty interesting looking.  “It seems like a person could do something with those,” I thought.  “But what?  Maybe they would look good on the wall as a piece of graphic art!”  Boy wouldn’t The Man just loooove that!  Uh ----NO.  I wandered back into the house wondering why there seemed to be so many untapped possibilities in objects that most people consider “junk.”

Well, imagine my surprise when two days later, I opened the “Your Good House” supplement included with the November 2012 issue of Good Housekeeping, and saw this:

Apparently I’m not the only one that sees possibilities in “junk.”  That’s somehow very comforting….