I recently graduated from Barnard College, where the dorm rooms are notoriously small and the twin XL mattresses are notoriously plastic-y and hard as a rock. This seems to be the case at most colleges in the United States, but the nightmare mattress reality didn’t hit me until I went to bed at the end of move-in day. I had yet to purchase a mattress topper and hadn’t slept in a twin bed since I’d surpassed the five-foot threshold. Needless to say, I spent my first night in a dorm room tossing, turning, and failing to find a comfortable position to sleep in.
My boyfriend suffered a similar fate that night in his own dorm across the street at Columbia, and we soon realized that a twin-size mattress (despite those precious five inches that turn it into an XL) was also much too small for two. We found a temporary solution in a Columbia-student-run company called Lion’s Den Rentals, which provides students with a full-size XL memory-foam mattress converter and frame along with facilitating drop-off, assembly, and pick-up for $349 a year or $249 a semester.
The Lion’s Den Rental worked really well for a year — a full-size bed is 15 inches wider than a twin, and those extra inches make a difference — but we couldn’t justify paying that much for two more years. So I took to Google and found DormCo’s Yak About It the College Converter, a collapsible contraption that attaches to a dorm-bed frame and extends it enough to support a full-size mattress, similar to the Lion’s Den rental. At just under $150, it seemed like a much more reasonable investment, and even after adding the cost of a larger mattress, it worked out to be much less than we would have paid had we continued the rental service.
The Yak About It converter came preassembled, so after unboxing it took only about ten minutes to set up. All we had to do was unroll it onto the dorm-bed frame and secure it with the included Velcro loop straps. Then we simply plopped our mattress on top of the extender and made the bed as usual. The next day, I woke up feeling well rested and free of aches or pains, much unlike my first night on campus. As time went on, I did need to re-center the mattress whenever I changed the sheets because the converter doesn’t have guardrails to hold a mattress in place. But the converter itself was very sturdy, so I didn’t have to fiddle with the Velcro straps until I disassembled the converter at the end of the year. And while I was worried about sacrificing floor space in my small single, the extender added only about a foot to my bed’s width, which I think was well worth it for the sleep that I gained. My spare dorm-issued mattress was also perfect if I had a friend visiting.
It’s worth noting that the extender is not a feat of master craftsmanship. The wood isn’t perfectly sanded, and the fabric holding the wood together is frayed at the ends. That said, the Yak About It converter served me and my boyfriend well for two years and supported my 12-inch-thick mattress without a problem. It survived two assemblies, two disassemblies, and three moves until we upgraded to an adult bed frame in our first apartment. Our current bed frame is definitely prettier than my trusty college converter, but my sleep quality has remained consistently solid since graduating — unlike that of my friends, who are just now enjoying the luxury of a full-size mattress. The only improvement I’ve noticed is that I no longer need to jump onto a lofted dorm bed before turning in for the night.
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