A Cautionary Tale Regarding Over-vigorous Bed Making

After reading an article favorited by Gregg about how to keep a cleaner house, I decided to turn over a new leaf and make my bed every morning starting this past Monday.

Monday and Tuesday's bedmaking went off without a hitch. No hospital corners as of yet, just a bed made well enough to lend an air of respectability for the throngs of pedestrian traffic that pass through my bedroom daily. Why am I doing this again?

But this morning, I found out there is such a thing as too much enthusiasm when making a bed. When I snapped the sheet in the air to get rid of the wrinkles and folds, it caught in the ceiling fan and freaked the living hell out of me for a few desperate moments. Fortunately, the laws of physics came through for me and I was neither chopped up into cuts of meat nor wrapped around the fan's central axis like Bugs Bunny.

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5 comments

  1. Not only am I implicated in a potential catastrophe, but I must admit having nearly suffered a similar fate at the beginning of summer while deploying a set of linens fresh from the clothes dryer. And somehow I always manage to position myself in reach of a ceiling fan when taking a shirt off over my head. The number of bruises I've gotten on my wrists and forearms! I cover it up by telling people my girlfriend beat me. (They seem to be okay with that.)

  2. All right, important safety tip — thanks, Egon.
    Being a tall glass of water and living in a 1967 ranch house with about 87 ceiling fans, I've been beaten a few times myself. Fortunately, I'm lax and don't sharpen the blades regularly.

  3. I've been doing the bed-making thing for a long time. I started when I was living in a studio–who wants to look at a messy bed all the time–and continue at least partially because I work from home half the time. Where my bedroom is also an office.You could try the lazy man's safer bed-making method–just pull up and smooth out the various covers, turn down if necessary, and fluff the pillows. All done.

  4. Oh, Dave … I haven't laughed that hard in a long time. Thanks!

    And yes, I'm in the habit of making my bed as well. Mine started
    while living in a dorm, where I had about 10 square feet of space to
    call my own — the majority of which were taken up by my
    bed. The habit stuck. And for some reason, it just
    feels nice to come home to a nice, neat bed.

  5. "The easiest way to make a room look cleaner is to make the biggest thing in it look neat," they said, so I started making the bed daily to test the theory. It works, to an extent – as you've illustrated, it can also be dangerous. I still make mine daily, because it's much easier for me to get into a made, clean bed while drunk.

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