My latest experiment to temper the mysterious vibration that shakes me awake each night was to apply a vibration directly to the bed to neutralize the irritating one.
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Vibrating Bed Fix Headway: A Wood Bed + Hockey Pucks
To date, I’ve published four lengthy posts about my desperate attempts to quiet the mysterious vibration that shakes me awake every morning. I lost count at twenty; the latest was making four 80+ pound concrete block legs to support the platform, which was a grid of wood on a frame of steel angle irons. The real…
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Vibrating Bed Fix #438: Homemade Concrete Block Bed Legs + Sorbothane
Since I last posted the Vibrating Bed Mystery Contest Update in October, I’ve tried MANY solutions to toning down the vibration that shakes me awake in my bed each night. Sleep-deprived and desperate, I pursued fixes by trial-and-error while entering into deep research into the nature of vibration, how it travels, what materials amplify it…esoteric stuff for a lay person.
Then an engineer who had worked at the Mayo clinic took an interest in my dilemma, which led to a BIG adventure in pouring concrete, LEAPING into unknown territory and being willing to fail.
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Vibrating Bed Mystery Contest Update
Several weeks ago, in desperation, we posted a challenge to our readers to come up with solution for our vibrating bed, which, shaken by some mysterious force, wakes us in the wee hours of the morning. Until we find the source, we are hoping to find a way to keep the bed from shaking, so we…
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Update on Vibrating Bed Solutions: Hanging Beds
In response to our contest asking for solutions to keep our bed from vibrating, a number of readers suggested suspending the bed, which we WISH we could do. But as with any creative problem, we have some serious constraints to deal with.
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Contest: Solve the Vibrating Bed Mystery
After a mysterious vibration in the floor started shaking our bed, and us, awake at night, we started improvising solutions. We’ve lost count of our attempts at damping the vibration. So we’re issuing a challenge to IL’s readers: help us devise a solution to keep the bed from vibrating.The winner will receive a lifetime subscription to Improvised Life. Here’s what we’ve tried already…
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Tailored, Adjustable Bed Skirt from Ready-Made Curtains
After we transformed a linen sheet into a bedskirt, we stumbled on Eileen Fisher’s clever bedskirt made of three adjustable panels of fabric. You just tuck each panel beneath the mattress at the foot and sides of the bed to adjust it to any length you like. We started mulling how to make our own. Then we had a brainstorm.
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Martha Antidote: Visit Alexander Calder in His Studio
(Video link here.) After we wrote about artist Tom Sachs’ practice of knolling, simple, incredibly effective steps he takes to neaten is very busy work space, we got an interesting comment from Kevin Neff, the engineer who helped us reason-out some of our vibrating bed experiments ages ago. He wrote: So interesting. I had been wrongly…
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Does Your Apartment Vibrate? Fixes that Help Tame Vibration
Here’s a summary of all the fixes I’ve found to dampen irritating, sleep-depriving vibrations coming from machinery and other mechanicals.
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Robin Williams Helps Carole Burnett Express Herself
(Video link HERE.) After a reader mentioned an episode of the Carole Burnett show riffing on The Princess and the Pea (a reference to our inability to sleep no matter what fix we do to the myseriously vibrating bed) we went hunting for it. We never found it* but stumbled on this extraordinary bit from…
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When Luminous Things Speak to Each Other (Levertov, W.S. Merwin, Marina Adams)
For weeks, Czeslaw Milosz’ very personal anthology of poetry, A Book of Luminous Things has sat on our table to open anywhere for an unexpected view of our world. It’s made us realize that when we read a poem, it starts a conversation within us and with other things…
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Simple Effective Way to Dampen Irritating Vibrations
Our ever-awake world is full of machinery creating disturbing vibrations (and sleepless nights). After much trial and error, here’s the most effective way we found to dampen them..
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Bent Copper Tubing Lamp Sculpture DIY (after Anna Fasshauer)
We’ve written about all sorts of practical things made out of copper pipe and tubing from room dividers to tables.The copper lighting we’ve posted has been simple, with one or two bends NOT the wonderfully freeform tangles of artist Anna Fasshauer’s light sculptures. Which seem, possibly, diy-able.
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Wireless Speakers We Love + How We Found Them UPDATE + Caveats
After we accidentally sacrified our trusty-ancient-unwieldy speakers trying to counteract the bed vibration that woke us up each morning, we went on the hunt for great sounding wireless speakers. We ended up getting two variations because music is so essential to us. It fuels our work when energy levels are low, helps us chill out, and even…
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Vibration Fixes: Levitation Suits + Air Mattress Shock Absorbers
Over the past year, I’ve written about the many improvised solutions I’ve created to try to NOT feel the mechanical vibration that shakes me awake every morning. I even looked into making a rig like this “Levitation Suit”, a designer’s attempt at a 3D hotel bed. In lieu of being able to be weightless or levitate, my newest vibration-damping fix came via some readers who had the same problem.
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