It’s easier than you think.
Let’s Put Together a DIY Mattress!
Sorta like assembling a ginormous layer cake.
That you sleep on.
yer cake.
Step 1
Unzip and spread out your zippered mattress cover on your bed frame.
Step 2
Plop your support layer – or layers – on top of the zippered cover.
STEP 3
Stack your comfort layer(s) on top of your support layer. Zip it up.
TINY PAIN, HUGE GAIN
Putting together your DIY mattress will take about 30 minutes more to set up than a typical bed-in-a-box.
But the minimal extra effort is so worth it. You can customize your mattress and repair it for decades to come.
An unzipped DIY Mattress in a Chelsea, Manhattan loft. 8″ of Leggett & Platt pocketed coils + 3″ organic latex foam surrounded by an 11″ cotton knit cover.
TASTY DIY MATTRESSES
A Layer Cake is a Great Analogy
The foam and coils are the cake layers, the extras are the fancy fillings, and a zippered cover is the frosting over the whole thing.
And just like a cake, the quality of the ingredients makes a huge difference in the quality of the finished product.
The great news is that you can buy the exact same quality components that the big companies use, at significant savings, and without any of the fillers or chemicals that you don’t want.
Putting together a customized DIY mattress takes a little more effort than just buying a factory-assembled and factory-sealed mattress, but the results are fairly epic, and the benefits are remarkably long-lasting.
Test THEN Wrap
Consider Buying Your Zippered Cover Last…
The videos below should make it clear that putting together your DIY Mattress is very easy.
And the best part? You can adjust it and repair it indefinitely. Viva la zippered cover!
But! If you have a couple options for your comfort layers (something we strongly suggest), you can sleep on your initial configuration for a couple weeks or months. If you aren’t completely thrilled, you can swap around your comfort layers and see if you like it better.
With a factory-sealed mattress without a zippered cover? If you don’t like the order of the layers as they were chosen, you’re stuck. You simply cannot open and adjust a mattress with a sealed cover.
Three layers of 3″ foams atop a 1″ coco coir base in a cabin in the Catskills. Consider making the zipped cover the last thing you buy for your DIY mattress. Sleep on it for a couple/few weeks, make any adjustments you’d like, then purchase a cover in the right size… in this case, a 10″ cover.
Watch & Learn
DIY Mattress Assembly Videos
Because mattresses are large and expensive furniture items (and because we rarely see what’s inside), we’ve been conditioned to believe they must be wildly complex beasts filled with complicated layers of exotic components.
But that’s not true at all.
The truth is a lot simpler… and that’s great news for all of us.
As we can see in the videos on this page, mattresses are just stacks of foams and/or coils and maybe some fancy extras if we want them.
Putting together a DIY mattress is so much easier than you might think!
Making a FloBeds Latex Mattress
An assembly time-lapse for people short on time. Flobeds use a zippered cover on their mattresses and also sell some of the more interesting components available on the market. They sell their parts as replacement for their mattresses, but anyone can buy them to use for a DIY mattress build.
More Watch & Learn
How to DIY an Organic Mattress + bonus ASMR
Our friends at DIY Natural Bedding demonstrate how simple it is to put together an organic latex mattress, with the added bonus of a double layer of fluffy, pure, natural wool. Deborah demos the making of a child’s mattress enclosed in an organic cotton zippered cover. All in less than 20 minutes.
And if you’re an ASMR fan, Deborah is a natural at that, too! Ah… so relaxing.
THE BASICS
Putting Together a DIY Mattress
A little extra info to help us all understand what the store-bought factory-sealed mattresses have inside… and how we can do even better.
How to Build a DIY Mattress
Everybody’s favorite DIY mattress OG, Ken Hightower, shows us how to make a very simple hybrid mattress.
When he refers to a ‘base core’ in this video, he’s talking about what’s more commonly called a ‘support layer.’
Once you understand the basics (and it’s really not hard) you can start playing around with adding extras and fancy upgrades as your budget allows.Ken sells DIY mattress components and you can give his store a visit.
How to Put Together a DIY Mattress – All Latex Foam
We keep going back to Ken at mattresses.net because he has often been the first person a mattress rebel comes across that convinces us we can take a whole different approach to mattress shopping.
Here he shows us how to assemble an all-foam mattress – in this case latex. It just takes a few minutes, and that’s it. A few minutes! Amazing, right?
How To DIY A Mattress …
PUT IT All TOGETHER
Spread out your zippered cover. Plop on your support layer. Toss on your comfort layers. Zip up your new mattress. Nap.
