The bed that I have been sleeping on for the past 21 years was purchased for me (by a friend using my credit card) when I was in the hospital having had major abdominal surgery, a 10.5" incision.  (They now do the same surgery laproscopically).  For the 18 years prior to that, I had slept on a futon on the floor.  For the past year and a half or so, I have been debating replacing the bed as it doesn't feel as supportive as it had previously.  I had been thinking to wait until January to move the expense into the new year as this year has been a costly one already in terms of home expenses, but after a couple of successive poor night's sleep and coming up on my busy time of year, I decided not to wait.

I also decided to go back to sleeping on a futon on the floor for better support and because I just prefer it--especially since I always have one or more "fur-kids" and they often sleep with me.  Actually when I had my last Basset Hound Henry, once he became ill, I slept on a foam pad in my living room for about a year and a half because he couldn't get upstairs where the bed was and we both felt better when I was near him.

So I bought a Japanese-style futon, although this one is 4" thick rather than the traditional Japanese 3" thick and it is the size of a twin bed rather than the smaller traditional Japanese dimensions.  I've slept on it 3 nights so far and so far so good in terms of how I'm sleeping.  Since this was delivered by Fed-Ex and left in a box at my door, I still need to get rid of the old bed.  A friend is going to come over next weekend and help me deconstruct the old bed so I can put it out in the trash.  I've never done this before but she has.  I remember when they moved the bed INTO my house, they needed to take out the window because a full-size boxspring would not make it up the narrow stairs (with turns at two small landings) of my hundred-year old house.  I'm glad that the window won't have to be removed from the frame again in order to get the old bed out!

Getting rid of the old bed will be step one of decluttering.  In other news, because my firm very kindly counted the week that I took off to study before the CFP exam as work time rather than as vacation time, I found that I had 8 days of vacation time accrued (with another 3 days still to accrue by the end of the year (as of 11/1), so I'm taking off next Friday and then from December 22 to December 31.  With weekends, that will give me a 12-day stretch away from the office.  Since Miss Buffy was hospitalized back in 2019, I've not gone away from home overnight and I've taken my vacation time as a series of long weekends.  The problem with that is that I never get any larger projects done around the house.  A long weekend is time enough to catch up on rest and to do something fun and catch up on the household chores, but there never is time for any larger household projects, so they just accrue.  I really want to make some progress decluttering over the next year and this will be time enough to pick at least one of the larger projects and just do it.  I'm going to start with the kitchen over Thanksgiving weekend and maybe I can get that decluttered then and use the time at the end of the year to turn an upstairs bedroom from "the storage room" to a home library/study/gym (which is what it was when I first moved in, before I decided to change careers).