Customer Reviews
Finally made my extra firm mattress bearable 
2006-12-12
Several years ago, my wife and I bought a firm Simmons Beautyrest mattress. It was pretty expensive, but we had previously owned a similar, smaller sized, one and really like it.
This new one was awful - it was hard, with about 1" of foam on either side of the springs. For years I have been tossing and turning in that bed. I think the earlier one had much more foam padding.
Finally we got fed up and decided to replace the current mattress. I've studied mattresses all over the internet and found most of them to be a bunch of layers of various types of foam on top of the springs. A few times I stopped in at the Brookstone store at the airport and layed on the tempurpedic and liked it, but was afraid to spend $2,000 on something I didn't know if I would like long-term.
I finally decided on a new Simmons mattress that had several layers of foam on top of probably the same springs we currently have. One of the layers of foam was 3" of visco foam with some standard egg-crate foam on top. The mattress was $2,700!! - but if it allowed me and my wife to sleep it was worth it. I was still afraid of the visco foam - would I like it?
So I told my wife we would gamble some money and buy this mattress topper - 3" of memory foam. I picked this one because it said it was 5 lb foam. At best it would transform our old mattress and make it good. At worst, it's a bust and we throw away $250. If we really liked it we could always buy the expensive mattress later.
So we ordered the foam. It came in about a week - rolled tightly in a 10" by 6 1/2 foot long roll. It was wrapped in 2 layers of very tough plastic - and the whole pad was covered by another layer of thin plastic. The cover is a pink terry cloth on top with a non-skid bottom. Seems like a pretty good quality product. We opened it up, let it sit for a day and relax and air out and put it on the bed - put the mattress pad on top and a sheet on the whole thing. It makes the mattress look like one of those really thick ones.
What a transformation! the bed is now soft and feels good. You sink into the memory foam - kind of like when I used to have a waterbed. It feels warm - it may get hot in the summer, but now in the winter it's very pleasant. It's been a week now, and I've slept better in that bed than I ever have. My wife really likes it too. I don't toss and turn like I did.
Too early to tell how long the pad will last - however I already know that my next mattress will have some kind of memory foam in it. I don't think we'll need to replace the mattress now, however, if we did, I would strongly take a look at that sleep shop 12" full foam mattress with 5" of memory foam. I don't think it's going to be necessary to spend the $2600 for springs in the future.
P.S. Another thing I was worred about was smell. There was a bit of smell - but it has largely dissipated in a week. It's sort of a sweet chemical smell - not very strong and not unbearable. A new mattress would have had something similar - so it didn't detract at all.
