Why I Ditched My Bed Frame and Started Sleeping on the Floor (And You Might Want to Try It Too)

I was twenty-three when my bed broke. Proper broke. Was sleeping in it one night, actually fell apart.

Not slowly, gradually broke – no, collapsed at approximately half ten on a Sunday night like the Beast From the East sneaked up behind it and shouted “boo!” Woke me and my downstairs neighbour up alright. This horrendous cracking noise and suddenly there I was, staring up at the plaster ceiling from my floor with nowhere to sleep but this pile of MDF and ridiculously tiny metal cam bolts that hold flat pack furniture together. Needless to say, I couldn’t immediately replace it – I’d only just moved into my new ‘cosy’ one bedroom flat in Beeston and the bank account was laughably empty for about three weeks.

So I just… left it. Against the wall.

Made up.

Got the dustpan and brush out. And I lived. Not wanted to, not expecting to enjoy it at all – presumed I’d be running to Argos the second some savings were deposited into my account.

But here’s the thing – it kind of worked. Looked fantastic, actually. Suddenly my bedroom felt bigger.

Instead of this bulky headboard and bulky bedframe and bulky fluffy pillows hogging all the eye-line there was nothing. Everything opened up. Running your eyes from edge-to-edge suddenly had far less to jar your gaze.

The room looked wider and taller, cleaner and just, somehow, more grown-up. It’s been fifteen years now and I still sleep low. Don’t have to, mind.

Danny and I could totally treat ourselves to a ‘proper’ bedroom suite. We’ve got the money for it. We just choose not to.

Because ever since that eventful Sunday night back in 2003, I’ve known that if you want to make a small bedroom feel bigger: drop your mattress low. Our spare room is laughably small. Inches tall, maybe.

Had an incredibly bulky double bed in there when we first moved in. Massive – Ikea metal frame job. Got ourselves laughed out of the room when we had guests staying.

You could tell they were smiling and politely trying to enjoy themselves, but inside they were thinking ‘yeah this is basically sleeping in a closet.’ Flip the mattress on the ground, construct a bed platform from old wood and suddenly people fight over who sleeps in our spare room. It doesn’t seem fair. Same size mattress.

Same tiny room. And yet: completely different vibe. The ceilings feel taller.

The walls feel further apart. And maybe best of all? You can walk around instead of doing that annoying side-stepping thing bedrooms seem to encourage you to do.

Trust me, though, there is a right and wrong way to do it. Plop your mattress directly on your carpet and it looks like you’re trying too hard not to be an adult. Messy mattress on slightly dirty carpet?

Student bedsit. Beautiful mattress on handmade bed platform, adorned with some seriously covetable bedding and – ta dah – you’ve suddenly knocked years of interior design studies and consider your choices carefully Buzzfeed quizzes. I’m going to level with you, building the platform was ridiculously easy.

Headed down to B&Q and spent £50 on some wood – some 2×6 bits of wood, some slats for the base so air can flow under the mattress. Saturday afternoon had it built. Hell, even Danny helped.

He held things while I got to grips with a spirit level (just go to B&Q, they’ll do it for you.) Dumped the mattress on top and voila: raised-bed hybrid that’s just high enough off the ground to look intentional, but not so high that it dwarfs the room. The Japanese have been onto this for years, haven’t they? Traditionally Japanese interiors are all so low to the ground; those beautiful tatami rooms.

There’s something very calming about sleeping so low. Grounds you. Makes you feel like part of the room, rather than sitting on top of it perched precariously atop some ridiculous furniture.

Let’s talk sheets. When everything’s at eye-level you can’t hide behind a faddy headboard or duvet cover up some nasty bed legs with a valance. The bedding really is your room.

Invest in good cotton sheets. Nothing busy that’ll clash with your wall colours and be adamant about washing EVERYTHING religiously. There’s nowhere to hide dirt or stains when your bed’s that low – so make sure you can actually see your bedframe and mattress once you’ve hoovered.

Sound negatory but once you take away the bedframe, suddenly you’ve got this massive expanse of wall that’s not being chopped up by bedside tables and bedside lamps and damn it if you don’t feel fifteen stone when you’ve got to sidestep your way past a standard lamp to roll out of a normal bed in the morning. Threw up a couple of budget-friendly floating shelves where our headboard would have been; three shelves, about three different heights to make it more interesting. Plonked our lovely book collection up there, along with a despondent looking succulent and the book I’m currently reading.

Bedside lamps seemed comically oversized when William and I were sleeping so, so low. Introduced pendant lighting instead. Positioned it right where we need it to be to illuminate our book pages.

Feels like you’re cocooned in there, actually – instead of sitting on the ground with massive barn doors either side of your head. Flat floor bed was, unintentionally, the start of something wonderful for us. But Rachel – bless her – bought an identical platform when she stayed over and errored by literally putting her existing mattress on her bedroom floor.

Looked bloody awful. Like she’d been evicted and was living out of binbags. Pulled her together by getting her to build a proper platform from scratch, chucking a whopper of a rug over it to distinguish the ‘bed area’ and hanging her curtains from the ceiling, way above where the ‘window’ was to draw the eye up.

Same mattress. Same shoebox bedroom. Completely different feel.

Another downside? Cleaning. Where do dust bunnies breed when your bed is essentially the floor?

Haven’t been able to shrug away dust under my bed since building that platform. Now I Hoover underneath twice a week. Sounds like a bore but: it takes all of thirty seconds because guess what?

There’s fuck-all to catch the hoover under a platform bed. And hey prestice – my bedroom floors now actually look clean, tbh. Even started noticing scuffs and scratches I didn’t even realise were there.

Advice though. Don’t just rest your mattress on the floor. Ours did this for about a month once when we got a new mattress.

That whiff of damp that hits you when you open your duvet?ours had that, but coming from the mattress itself. Been informed by approximate six billion Google searches it was down to lack of air flow. Platform with slats isn’t just aesthetic folks, throw down a mattress without ANYWHERE for air to get at the underside and you’ll regret it.

Literally spent £50 on some wood and probably saved my £400 mattress.

I think my favourite thing about floor beds? How it changes your relationship with the rest of the room.

With normal beds, your eye is drawn to your biggest piece of furniture first then works out everything else around it. Beds that sit low on the ground instead become part of the room rather than a chunky box on legs dominating proceedings. There’s less for your eye to focus on.

Everything feels wider. Roomier. A place you want to be, not just somewhere you need to sleep at the end of every day.

Tiny bedrooms don’t have to feel like prisons. Sometimes it isn’t about cramming crap into every usable cupboard nook and cranny – sometimes it’s about taking away the eye catching furniture that make rooms feel, well, small in the first place. Get low.

You’ll wonder why you didn’t do it sooner.