Turns Out Free from Craigslist IS Too Good to Be True

 It didn't take long once I got married for my in-laws to stay with us, in fact the first time my apartment was filled in-laws was before we even got married. I held on to the naive hope that they invasions would be infrequent and that my in-laws would be deterred by our lack of bed. No such luck. They would bring their own air mattress. I was eventually convinced that my in-laws were gracious enough to do so many things for us that we could buy an air mattress for them to use. Again, I naively believed this would be enough of a bed considering how much I hoped they would visit. I was then introduced to the fact that the family I married into expected a bed and preferably a guest room always be available for their many, many visits, and nothing we did or didn't do would stop these visits. Thus, we began our search for a real guest bed.
   While we had resigned ourselves to the fact that we were obligated to buy a bed we did not want to drop a lot of money on one considering our poor newlywed status. We took to the internet to find a cheap mattress.
We found one that (from the pictures) looked like it was in good condition, and more importantly it was free! We then drove down to Orem to collect our prize in our little Honda. I was skeptical as to exactly how we would manage to squeeze a full sized mattress into our backseat but my husband confidently assured me (in a similar manner to the men that are positive that they can indeed jump from the roof to the pool without injury) that mattress bend easily and it would fit no problem. The bed in question was huge and did not bend very well. My husband and I spent a great deal of time trying to fold our large, free mattress into our backseat the same was you would fold a slice of bread in half and wedge t into a stuffed lunch box. It was similar to a large person trying shove themselves into pants three sizes too small. Shove with all your strength but only mange to get an inch in.
    The whole time we were shoving this huge mattress into our car I was waiting for a neighbor to call the cops to report the world's most incompetent thieves. Eventually some thirteen year old boy in a cast walked by and took pity on us. Between the three of us shoving, pulling and squishing the bed we finally wedged it into our minuscule backseat. We finally got it home, out of our car and into the spare room. We knew when we acceptable a used mattress from craigslist that we would have to clean it but looking at it in the harsh light we realized to our horror that there were far too many  irredeemable questionable stains, including what looked suspiciously like bird dropping from being outside. After all that work we ended up tossing the mattress that was indeed too good to be true into the dumpster. After that we caved in and went to a mattress store to procure a clean mattress at a reasonable price. Instead of wedging it into our little car the poor worker tied it to the top of our car in the rain. The whole way home we worried it would slip right off our car, but luckily it made it all the way home intact.