Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Day 0. Since buying a mattress - especially online - is such a major decision for many people, I thought I'd start a kind of review "blog" about my experience with this one. I traded out a more traditional box spring whose spring had long since sprung for the SSE 6 Inch Full Mattress, White. It was the right size and the right price. I push 300 lbs stand 6'3" and I do more tossing and turning at night than a clothes dryer on crack, so you have some kind of baseline by which to judge your opinion of the mattress' performance. Beyond price and size, a couple more of the reasons I bought this are that it was reputed to be firm (I need firm), and because it's a more traditional "box spring" kind of mattress, it could be flipped. I have cats. They have furballs. I leave the rest of that rationale to your imagination. It arrived in a large (almost 6 feet tall) apparently reusable and durable blue draw-string duffel bag suitable for large amounts of laundry, or doubling as a thin sleeping bag for a tall, skinny individual. I don't qualify for the latter use. Your "duffel bag" may vary, since it wasn't in the instructional video. Setting up the mattress was simple, but try to use blunt-nosed scissors to cut the plastic wrapping as sharp ones might cut the fabric of the pad. Knives aren't at all a good idea. The video shows the general way it works, but they do it a lot better than I did. Practice makes perfect, I guess. I didn't notice any odor at all as some other reviewers have mentioned. It sounded somewhat like movie night as the springs each unbound with a popcorn pop as it began to unfold. This is apparently normal. It did not come with butter or salt. The thickness of the mattress after several hours was exactly 5 inches - not 6. The package says it could take up to 48 hours for it to fully inflate and I'll report the "final" thickness after it's had time to marinate. As for the firmness, it has a good-news/bad-news aspect to it. The good news is that it's a lot more firm than my old sprung spring box. The bad news is that when I put one knee on it, it goes straight to the slats. So the firmness is cumulative over a large area, and not pinpoint. I encompass a large area, so the firmness is an improvement over what I had before, which is to say my old mattress was like laying on a giant, fresh marshmallow. The new one feels much more "bedlike" and I'm not folding into the shape of a taco laying on it for a few minutes like I was before. And that's about where we leave off for now. I have yet to actually SLEEP on it, so we'll know if my chronic insomnia is caused by my resembling a Mexican entree most of the time while I sleep, whether I sleep well, or if I find a whole new, exciting way to be kept up at night. I have NOT thrown out the old mattress yet. - More to come. -Day 10 So far so good. The down-side is that it is still only 5 inches thick, even long after the 48 hour window. I'm not sure if it will ever get to the advertised 6 inches, but it doesn't seem to affect things with regard to the comfort of the mattress - at least for me. Otherwise, it seems like a decent to pretty good mattress. It's firm enough for a Supertanker like me, I don't sink into the coils like the Titanic on a bad night, and I can sleep pretty well on it. Bedroom athletics with the wife are more enjoyable since we're able to stay where we want instead of listing from port to starboard and back like a tall ship in a storm and getting sea-sick. I don't recommend acute, motion-sickness-induced nausea as a turn-on, but I digress. Admittedly, it has no track record with regard to durability, but I'm giving it another star, for 4 total, because (so far) it has been a good replacement for a more traditional (ie: Full metal frame) worn-out box spring mattress. If it lasts 8 years, it'll get five stars. My old one lasted about 8, and cost roughly the same as this one, so that's the baseline. I'll be back next year (assuming none of my ships sink in the night) to update this. If, however, I get that sinking feeling in my sleep, I'll be back sooner. -More to come