Why Sleep Matters More on a Weekend Trip — and the Custom RV Mattress We Bought

Disclosure: Tochta sent us this mattress at no cost, and the links below are affiliate links — if you buy through one we make a commission, and it doesn’t cost you any extra. They didn’t see this post before it went up.

Two nights. Maybe three. That’s what a weekend trip actually gives you, and you drove out to get them after working all week.

We went fifteen years RVing before we ever looked seriously at a custom RV mattress, and when we finally did it wasn’t because we wanted something fancy. It was because of how little time we get. On a two-week trip, a bad first night is just a rough start — you’re over it by Wednesday. On a Friday-to-Sunday, a bad first night eats a third of the trip. The trip you’ve been thinking about since Tuesday. The one you took a vacation day for.

You don’t get to shrug that off when you only camp a few days at a time. There aren’t enough other nights to make up for it. That took us fifteen years and a tape measure to figure out.

If you already know you want one and just want the builder we used, here it is: https://www.tochta.com/ref/137/ — that’s our affiliate link, so we make a commission if you order through it, and the code CURVES5 knocks 5% off. The rest of this is why we finally did it.

Two Nights Is a Harder Sleep Problem Than Two Weeks

Here’s the thing nobody warns you about weekend camping: the drive out is work. You leave after a shift, you tow in the dark, you set up in the dark, and you get to bed a lot later than you meant to. Then Saturday’s your only real day, so you’re up early whether you slept or not. Sunday you’re breaking it all back down.

On a long trip none of that hits as hard, because you settle in. First night’s rough, second one’s better, and by about day four you’ve gotten used to the bed. A weekend never makes it to day four. You get the rough night, and then you go home.

We had this backwards for a long time. We figured the bed didn’t matter much since we weren’t out there that often. It’s the other way around — the less you’re out there, the more those few nights have to count.

Then there’s Grizzly. He’s 110 pounds of Great Pyrenees and German Shepherd, and as far as he’s concerned the bed is his. Whatever room you thought you had, subtract a dog.

What We Slept On for Fifteen Years

Whatever came in the rig. Every time.

Fifteen years and we never once replaced a mattress. Not because they were any good — we just didn’t know there was another option. As far as we knew, you either kept the factory one or you pulled into one of those RV mattress places off the highway and bought whatever they had on the floor. We tried that. It was the same cheap foam we already had with a different tag on it, and it cost a few hundred dollars to find that out.

So we kept the factory mattress. Custom RV mattresses were out there the whole time. We just never went looking, because it never occurred to us to.

The Sizing Thing Nobody Explains

This is where most people give up and buy whatever fits.

“RV King” isn’t a standard size. It’s not regulated, and it doesn’t mean the same thing from one company to the next. Two manufacturers will both sell you an “RV King” and ship two different mattresses. Same story with “Short King,” “Short Queen,” and pretty much the rest of it. Even the companies that publish a size chart will tell you to go measure your own bed anyway.

Ours was worse than that. The bed in our 2021 Alliance Paradigm 310RL has nightstands built in on both sides, so the space between them is narrower than a standard 72-inch king. Only by an inch and a half, but that’s plenty. A mattress that’s too wide doesn’t kind of fit — it rides up on the nightstands, it won’t lay flat, and you’re fighting it every time you make the bed.

So we ordered ours at 70.5 by 80. Inch and a half narrower than the size we’re supposedly supposed to take, cut to the space we’ve actually got.

That’s what custom means here. Not fancier. It just fits.

Do This to Your Bed Frame First

Do this before the new mattress shows up, not after.

A real memory foam mattress weighs a lot more than the thin one that came with the rig. If your bed lifts up on gas struts so you can get at the storage underneath — and on most fifth wheels it does — those struts were sized for the light mattress. Put the heavy one on top and the bed might not stay up on its own anymore, or it comes down faster than you’d like.

Swap the struts while the bed is empty. It’s a much easier job with nothing on it — you’re not wrestling a mattress or holding the lid up with your shoulder while you dig around for the second bolt. Pull the old one out, do the struts, then bring the new one in.

Ask us how we know. Same lesson as most of the upgrades we’ve actually kept — ten minutes of prep saves an hour of cursing.

What We Ordered

A Tochta Utopia, 10 inches, memory foam, cut to 70.5 by 80. We had the mattress pad custom-cut to match too, which turned out to be worth doing — a standard pad on a custom mattress puts you right back where you started.

Here’s the builder if you want to look at it: https://www.tochta.com/ref/137/ — affiliate link, we make a commission if you order through it, and CURVES5 takes 5% off.

What’s Worth Knowing Before You Buy a Custom RV Mattress

The stuff that actually mattered to us, and probably will to you:

• They’re hand built in Southern California, and Tochta has been making mattresses since 1980. It’s not a drop-shipper with a size calculator on the front page.
• Shipping is free in the contiguous US, and it takes about two weeks to build and get to you.
• The foams are CertiPUR-US certified — an independent standard for what’s in them and what they off-gas.
• There’s no fiberglass in the fire barrier. It’s a knit polyester-cotton blend treated with a food-grade salt. If you’ve read the horror stories about fiberglass in mattress covers, that’s the thing you’re checking for.
• Ten-year warranty on manufacturing defects.
• A 100-night trial that covers custom sizes. That one surprised us. Almost nothing cut to order is returnable — you sign off on the numbers, they cut the foam, it’s yours. A trial that still applies to a custom cut isn’t normal in this business.

Now the parts that might make you wait.

It’s not cheap and it’s not quick. Two weeks means you order it a month out, not the week before you leave. It’s heavy, which is the strut job we just talked about. And once it’s cut, you’re stuck with it — you’re not going to resell it easily, and it won’t fit the next rig if that bed is a different size. If you’re thinking about trading next season, that’s a real reason to hold off.

One more thing, because we’d rather say it than let you assume it: we haven’t had this mattress very long. We’re not going to tell you how it’s holding up in year three, or what it did for anybody’s back, because we don’t know yet. What we can tell you is what the old one was costing us — two or three nights at a time, forty or fifty times a year, on a mattress we’d already admitted wasn’t good enough.

How to Measure Before You Order

Do it once, do it carefully, and write the numbers down.

• Measure the platform, not the old mattress. The old one might have compressed, shrunk, or been cut wrong at the factory. Go off the frame.
• Measure the gap between your nightstands, if you’ve got them on both sides. That’s where our inch and a half came from.
• Check the closet doors. They have to actually clear the mattress, not just look like they will.
• Check it with the bedroom slide IN. This is the one everybody forgets. Everything fits fine with the slide out, and then you pull in for a travel day and your new mattress is in the way.

If you’re stuck between two numbers, go with the smaller one. Half an inch short and you’ll never notice it. Half an inch long and you’ll be looking at it every night.

We Filmed the Install

The unbox, how we landed on the size, the struts, and getting a 10-inch mattress through an RV bedroom door — it’s all in the video.

Honestly, the measuring is what stops most people, and it takes fifteen minutes. Start there.

When you’re ready to build one: https://www.tochta.com/ref/137/. Affiliate link, so we make a commission on orders through it, and CURVES5 gets you 5% off.

New videos every Sunday. Subscribe on YouTube so you don’t miss the next one. And if you want to know what else has held up in this rig — and what hasn’t — we went through all of it in our four-year Paradigm 310RL review.

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