It started very innocently….a few comments here and there. Eleven-year-old daughter wasn’t really a fan of her loft bed.
The immediate backpedaling always went: “But I love the desk space!” She really did love the huge expanse of tabletop underneath. It’s the bump-your-head-on-the-ceiling bed she didn’t care for.
We’d changed from her regular bed to the loft bed when she was sharing a room with her foster sister. (There was a while, back in 2014, when I truly felt like there was no problem IKEA couldn’t solve.) Her double bed–part of the furniture set that I inherited from my grandmother when I was a little girl–was much too large to fit in a room with yet another twin bed besides. She has an exceptionally large bedroom, but not that large. Eventually our fosters moved out and moved on, but the loft bed stayed. Great storage. Great desk. And, yeah, there was a bed up there, too.
A few weeks ago my daughter was sick. She was up in the middle of the night vomiting, and once she hobbled back to her room I asked if she’d like me to just make her up a bed on the floor….because who wants to climb a ladder when you want to puke? She’s always been the Queen of the Blankets, so we had enough to make her up a comfy “mattress,” with some left over to tuck her up. She slept there the entire next day (poor kid) and then the next few nights.
And then the next few weeks.
And then today the fateful words: “Mama, could we move my mattress to the floor?”
Deep breath. “Would you consider selling your loft bed?”
“YES!”
I’m conflicted. There’s a piece of me wanting to beat myself up for wasting money on the thing; because it feels like wasted money. Why did we buy it if we’re just going to turn around and sell it, 2 1/2 years later? But that bed was used–I would almost say necessary–for the time we had it. When we had two girls in that room, it even gave them each their own desk….and a heck of a lot more floor space. We couldn’t predict the future; we didn’t know that she wouldn’t be sharing a room indefinitely. And now, it is no longer serving its purpose here: it’s more of a problem than a solution. It’s time to let go.
Wow, does she have her work cut out for her. We won’t sell it until she’s figured out what to do with all her Stuff: Books, stuffed animals, and Legos all made their home in that thing. She’s upstairs right now, though, with a big box (which she requested, “for all the stuff I’m going to get rid of….”) and with her mattress moved to the floor (“Look! Now I kind of have a window seat!”). I wish her luck. Now I have to go shop for mattresses.
(Quick update: “You know, when I really go through my stuffed animals, I only have ten left!” Now THAT’S progress.)
Pursuing "enough" 
We just sold our old dining room table. It’s a British antique and was almost the first “real” piece of furniture we had. We paid what was a lot of money for us in those days, $50, and sold it for $100 this year. To keep up with inflation, it should have been around $300, but there was no way I could get that much. I finally decided we’d had the thing for more than 30 years, we’d used it for that time. So, if I rented a dining room table? It would cost us what? $20/month? At that rate, 20 x 12 x 30 = $7200. Somehow, selling it for $100 and having had it for all that time for “free” became a lot easier.
If you had rented the bed(s), how much would it have cost you? Was it a waste? No. You can’t beat yourself up for what you didn’t know in the past. None of us knows what will happen, all you can do is make your best guess, cross your fingers and leap into the future.
You did. Things changed. You’re adapting. If you sell the old bed to help defray the cost of the new mattress, then you’ve done what you can to reuse that money.
I’m fascinated by your math idea…I just calculated that it cost us 44 cents a day to use the bed for the time we had it. I can live with that. 🙂
And YES to “you can’t beat yourself up for what you didn’t know in the past.” IF I knew how this would have all panned out, I would have done things differently. But we made our best guess….and now, yep, we need to adapt.
And my daughter was just a little bummed when she realized we’d be using the money from the sale of the bed to buy the new mattress. I think she was hoping to pocket the cash. 😉