I have a couple of shams, mainly because I don’t have a headboard. They’re useful for protecting my head from direct contact with the wall.
I will say, though, that my shams are just regular pillows with slightly fancier washable pillowcases on them. No funky European sizes, no velvet requiring dry cleaning, etc.
I actually found a use for one of my sham pillows: I use it as an air dam to keep the exhaust from Fast Eddie’s CPAP from freezing me to death. We have a brass headboard, and it stands up between the center tubes just great. The other sham is under a pile of other unused bedding on top of a tote. I hate a lot of fru-fru in the bedroom as well.
Oh, and bedskirts are useful for hiding all the crap you shove under the bed for storage.
One mattess, one fitted sheet, one top sheet, one comforter in winter, two pillows, no frills.
Sometimes being divorced is a wonderful thing. It also gives me half of the king size bed to store the books I am in the process of reading.
Will they ever make bedding right? First you need a half mattress that is about 6 inches thick. It goes on the guy’s side. Then on the womans side you put all those extra coverings in a half size. The next is a normal bed sheet, an then a comforter. The guy will sleep with a bed sheet and comforter to keep the wife happy. He will want to sleep on the comforter, but that will result in confrontation. The woman will still be cold under the 10 layers on her side, while the man is still hot, but it won’t be as hot as the old setup.
For the pillows get a throw pillow for each of the football teams. Tell her one of these go for one of hers that go. Get a dog to chew up the pillows on the bed.
You believe this will work don’t you?
My current set up is a fitted sheet and a velux blanket. I can throw on the comforter that is stored in the closet if I needed it.
We do too. We each have our own blankets and two pillows each. There are no frills.
I get hot at night so I take the blanket on and off a lot. With seperate blankets I don’t disturb him whipping it on and off. He in turn likes the cocoon type sleep with the blanket all tucked in around him. There is no way I can deal with that.
We have two pillows each that are over two years old. If I wanted new pillows I would buy them and offer the same for him but I am not going to throw his out and replace them unless he wants me to.
Word.
Hell, my wife and I don’t even bother making the bed anymore. So there’s no need for all that fancy shit. Nobody ever sees it, so who cares.
We do this, too. We have very different responses to the temperature.And we have no extraneous stuff on the bed – pillows and a bedcover. And generally one or two cats. All blankets and sheets reside elsewhere until we go to bed.
When the ex-Mr. Lucky was around, we used only the 2 regular pillows and one of the shams, which went under my regular pillow and wasn’t particularly frilly. Not only that, we actually slept under the comforter! I ought to have my woman card revoked for allowing that! 
The only extra pillow we ever had was a body pillow I used when I was pregnant, which I threw out after the Princess was born. Now that I am on my way to being single again, I bought another body pillow, mostly for the extra warmth and just because it’s nice to have something to hug once in a while.
Which you then forget about until it comes crawling out in the early hours clutching a machete gibbering, drooling and screaming manically
EXACTLY!! We even have a lock on the bedroom door to prevent stray guests from wandering in there. Way less labor intensive.
One for the knees, and two for the chest. As God intended.
Enjoy,
Steven
Nah, those things get tucked into the basement instead. I need my beauty sleep.
That’s what I have too. And only because my duvet cover came with the shams and I happened to have two pillows I didn’t like. They do make it easy to make the bed: pull up the duvet, arrange the shams over your real pillows and you’re done.
For some reason I get this image of a scene in a maximum security prison, where the leader of the Aryan Brotherhood is confronting RTFirefly in the exercise yard:
AB: So you think you’re tough, huh.
RT: Well yes, I’ve never turned up the dial on my heated mattress pad above 4.
This thread is reminding me of “Along Came Polly”–the pillow-slashing scene!
cough I need to turn in my girl card apparently.
Our bed has one fitted sheet, one flat sheet, one microfiber blanket and six pillows (all of which are at least occasionally functional). Three for each of us. Granted, we generally only want two (one for sleeping on and one for extra propping when reading in bed for me and for him one over his head and one under while sleeping), but the other two are keeping the headboard pressed up against the wall as it’s not actually attached to our bed frame.
No shams, no weird non-functional pillows, no duvet.
Then again, we pretty much only make the bed approximately 5 minutes before bedtime (except on laundry day, when it gets made whenever the sheets are out of the dryer) and then only because we pretty thoroughly trash the cover distribution at night.
They are actually comfortable. It takes time to wear it down to the appropriate shape and density. I have found that no pillow less than around 15 years old functions well as a sleeping aid. If you’ve got a comfortable pillow, who cares about the stains?
But do your pillows have beads and sequins?
No?
Well, then.