Please help me find the right mattress

Hi, Sorry to bore you with all my mattress related woes but I really need some proper guidance and advice as I don’t even remember the last time I had a comfortable night sleep in my own bed.

I have a standard double sleigh bed with fixed slats not sprung).

I have been mostly sleeping on the sofa for best part of 18 months due to 2 frozen shoulders which meant I needed the back support of the sofa to keep me semi upright in sleep to stop my shoulders dropping backwards which caused pain.

Now I am relatively pain free unless I lie on the worst affected shoulder for a prolonged period so I am making a concerted effort to get back into a proper routine of sleeping and want to go back to my bed.

I had a problem with current mattress giving me really pretty unbearable lower back pain before I abandoned the bed for the sofa, anyway returning to the bed now and trying to sleep in it for last 2 nights I have definitely still got the issue with the lower back pain, probably not helped by being used to sleeping on the nice soft foam filled seats of the sofa for over a year.

I travel a fair bit for work and have experienced many different beds in different hotels and have found I don’t get on with most of them, I have resorted to sleeping on sofas in the rooms and even on the communal lounge sofa at one posh country hotel as I could not bear the pain in my back the mattress was causing.

The only exception I have found so far are the very comfortable beds I recently experienced at the Crowne Plaza in Leeds (I am trying to find out what bed and mattress they have so I can see if I can afford one!).

I find pretty much all mattresses to be far too firm for me, I feel like I need a reasonably thick (at least 20-24cm deep as my bed is quite low and I don’t want to sleep that low) soft mattress.

I am losing weight but am currently around 22 stone and I know most mattresses are designed for those up to 18 stone.

My husband is also losing weight and is currently just under 17 stone.

He has no major issues with our current mattress or any hotel mattress we have ever stayed on apart from the odd ache if he has slept a bit funny so I think he would be pretty ok with anything as long as I could cope with it.

I have no budget to speak of but would love to get away with not paying massively for something suitable as I intend to change the bedroom furniture and get a bigger bed in the next year or so, but I need a mattress for this current bed.

I was hoping for something anywhere between £500 – £1000, but will go a bit higher if necessary.

Can you suggest anything please?