Back in January, I wrote about how we decided to build our own giant hammock and how we added small spreader bars in order to spread out the hammock a bit so that the sides didn’t come up so high.

Well, I always knew our hammock was larger than almost anything else out there, and figured I would eventually cut it down once I determined what the disadvantage of this size was. (We started out by using the width that the fabric came in, and cutting it down is quite easy.)

A few weeks back, I finally started sleeping in the hammock full time. I’ve had chronic back problems from time to time, and I could feel how my back was getting stiffer and stiffer when I woke up in the mornings. So I just thought, “I think I’ll try the hammock”.

And it was amazing. My back has never felt better. When I wake up in the morning, I don’t feel stiff at all. And given that we live in Bangkok and don’t have air-conditioning, opening the windows and turning on the fan and allowing the cool night air to flow both under and over me is a treat. (I actually have to use a blanket.)

Key reminder: when sleeping in a hammock, you don’t sleep “straight” on it because it curves your back. You sleep at an angle, which allows your body to straighten out and lie flat.

But the hammock really was ridiculously wide and the extra fabric just folded up on the sides making it hard to get in and out. So we decided to cut the hammock down to the common size of two meters wide.

This then meant that the spreader bars were no longer needed.

So now the hammock is really just a giant 4m x 2m piece of cloth with a seam on both sides allowing a rope to hold it up.

Here are some pictures of the new setup:

Note the bed underneath where Praew sleeps. She still thinks it will hurt her back and hasn’t tried sleeping the whole night in the hammock yet.

On the side my head points towards, it is nothing more than a piece of rope looped through the seam we stitched and strung up to the wall.

But on the foot side, we asked the workers to bend us an S-shaped piece from scrap rebar. By putting this in the middle of the rope, it allows us to unhook the hammock and get it out of the way whenever we want to.

Here is a close-up:

So I’ve traded my bed for a hammock and I’m not looking back. 🙂