I'm not the most handy person.  I can hammer a nail, use a power drill, and perhaps most importantly, follow directions!  I'm not afraid to at least take a look at things - but I'm the first person to admit I have no freaking idea what to do and like hell am I taking anything apart that I can't put back together!

Well our bed has this nasty creak.  We have a sort of Ikea bed...all out of particleboard.  A square frame on the ground with a sort of T-bone structure that goes in the middle for support, and then three pieces of particleboard edge-to-edge across the top to make a platform for the mattress.  It always made subtle shifting noises when you move, but the past few months or I don't really know how long now, it's been developing this godawful squeak/creak on DH's side.

The problem is that he moves a LOT in his sleep, especially when he's right on the verge of waking up.  And I'm not nearly as heavy a sleeper as he is.  So every morning about an hour before the alarm the creaking bed will wake me up.  I try to go back to sleep, and just as I'm drifting off he moves again and the noise wakes me up.  I can sleep through the actual tossing and turning but that noise!!  This morning for the umpteenth time, I was laying awake at 5 a.m. thanks to the [bleepity bleep] creak, and thinking, "I have GOT to do something about this bed."

I was afraid I would get the mattress off and find out there was nothing to be done.  It obviously isn't the highest quality, it probably wasn't designed to last for years, maybe it was just giving out?  Maybe it had warped?  No, that was dumb; particleboard doesn't warp (see, I'm handy enough to know that much!)

It turns out the fix was so simple I'm kicking myself for not looking into it sooner and saving myself so much early morning grief.  The middle of the 3 particleboard "planks" was missing a screw on DH's side, and the remaining screwhole had apparently been stripped so the screw has no hold on anything.  It was still firmly in the plank piece but it wasn't actually holding the plank to the bottom part of the bed, so that middle plank piece was basically free floating on his side.  The creak was from the plank grinding against the two planks on either side and the frame on the bottom.

I spent a few minutes wondering if I could drill a new pilot hole and put the screw in fresh wood, but it's one of those funky Ikea furniture screws and not a "real" screw so I wasn't sure how to go about it.  Plus a) we're moving in like a week; we'll just have to take it apart then anyway and b) if the first hole got stripped, the second one would eventually too.

But I could try to wedge something in the gaps to stop the rubbing and maybe even stop the middle piece from moving around quite so much.  Something skinny...piece of paper? Plastic bag?  I'm kneeling on the floor at the side of the bed and across the room I can see my quilting stash...

Long story short there are now two bits of scrap fabric (the beginning of a flying dutchman block if you're curious) under our bed and that was all it took to silence the creak!  I sat down on the bed, laid on it, rolled back and forth - ahh, sweet silence!  We'll see tonight for the real test, but I have a feeling those 2 scraps of fabric are all it will take to give me a better night's rest.  Why did I not do this WEEKS ago??