I recently spent a week sleeping on sofa cushions in a holiday lodge.

I won’t bore you with the full details of why this happened, but I can assure you it was more to do with everyone else getting better sleep than because I was in trouble with my wife.

By the end of the week I had figured out how to construct a comfortable mattress using sofa cushions.

Step 1: put the sofa cushions on the floor

On night one I attempted to sleep on the sofa with the cushions in place. This was a major error. Sofas typically have ‘webbing’ or some other type of support that is far less resistant than a decent pocket sprung mattress. As a result I ending up sinking into the sofa and endured a terrible night’s sleep.

A much better bet is to put the sofa cushions on the floor. Pick a flat section of the floor so you aren’t half on a rug.

You also need to put the head of your sofa-cushion-mattress against a wall or something else solid. This will stop your pillow slipping off during the night and also feels much more like a normal bed with a headboard.

Step 2: use the correct part of the sofa

Sofas are typically made of a mix of a foam and fibre. The foam section is generally what you sit on whilst the fibre section is typically what you lean on when sat down. The foam on a sofa is much more mattress-like than the fibre (see our foam mattress guide). In fact, the fibre is much closer in material to what a synthetic duvet is made from and isn’t meant to give you any support.

In my case, I had two large sofa cushions which I could shove together nicely. Unfortunately, my feet hung off the end so I used one of the fibre sections of cushion for the foot section. This worked quite well, as the majority of my weight (my hips and shoulders) were on the foam sections whilst my feet were on the less supportive section of the mattress.

I was lucky in that the sofa cushions were flat so they pushed together without leaving very obvious gaps or uneven sections. My advice is to try turning the cushions upside down to give yourself a move level surface. You don’t want to be falling down the gaps between the cushions.

It’s really important to choose a combination of cushions that adds up to a single bed size or thereabouts (190cm x 90cm). It will soon become obvious why this is important.

Step 3: add a comfort layer

This is my favourite trick when building a mattress from sofa cushions.

If you have one available, get a king size or super king size duvet without a cover and fold it in half. You can then lay it on top of the cushions to create a single size comfort layer, which is actually pretty similar in design to a lot of mid-priced mattresses.

This covers up a lot of the lumps and gaps of the sofa cushions and can make a real difference to your comfort.

You want to use a synthetic hollowfibre or natural feather duvet ideally. If you’ve got a choice of togs, go for a higher one such as 10.5 or 13 tog.

Step 4: hold it together with a fitted sheet

This is another neat little trick.

Get a single fitted sheet (i.e. an elasticated sheet) and wrap it around everything. A standard sheet won’t do the trick but if you have built a mattress of about 90cm wide and 190cm long then this will pull everything together and stop you falling into a gap during the night.

Step 5: black out the room

If you are sleeping in a lounge, it will likely be much lighter than you are used to.

Do your best to cover up the windows as too much light may well wake you up earlier than planned.

I like to cover up red LED lights from TVs and other appliances with tiny bits of black duct tape.

For the windows, you can either use blankets or sheets of cardboard. The latter is certainly more effective, particularly if you have some big sheets that you can cut into shape and wedge into the window. You can also buy blackout window film, which is basically a roll of black plastic that uses static to stay attached to the window. A budget alternative is to use black bin bags and cut them into flat sections.