The mattress mangle...

Evidently when our house was built, people did not have anything other than twin or full size beds, it is not humanely possible to get a king or even a queen size bed mattress upstairs or into the basement. It is possible depending on the type of queen size mattress to mangle it into what we've called the "taco bend" to get it upstairs, but it's not possible to have a queen sized box spring upstairs. Thankfully the explosion of access to platform beds has made that not a huge issue. We spent the first several months with just our queen size mattress on the floor until we found a reasonably priced platform bed.