I'm not familiar with Ikea futons, but form the website it looks like the ones without the coils already have a memory foam layer? Not sure adding another would help or not. Would you consider a featherbed? That should not take up a lot of space folded up.

I am not familiar with the Ikea brand either but my son (12) and I have been having a huge disagreement about his futon. He has a twin over futon bed that I disassembled and moved to the basement when I thought my father in law was coming to live with us. He wants it brought back up. His other bed is a wonderful solid wood twin size captains bed with a matching night stand and bedside table. I don't want the solid wood set going to the basement but as I talked about in another post, it doesn't seem like the best idea to have a twin size bed in a guest room and I still haven't made the decision as to whether I want a devoted guest room or a home office.

I had purchased one of the Northnights 5" baffle box featherbeds from QVC but to me it just doesn't offer much support for his growing back. It does seem more comfortable though!

Good Luck!
Alicia

Our futon is a full size when open. I did buy an egg crate topper and actually I just left it on when I put the sofa cover on it and then folded up the futon back to sofa style. It's still comfortable to sit on. And that solves the storage issue.

My feedback from those who have slept on it is that the egg crate helps alot.

I have also added an egg crate topper with same comments. It helps. I also leave it on when the mattress is back as a couch.

I bought the memory foam matress for my futon and my RV bed. I love them. Made a huge difference in the comfort.

My This-End-Up futon is divided into three sections which fold to become the back of a sofa and flip out to lie flat on the floor. It is too low and the creases are uncomfortable so I place a feather bed on top of the futon. I am anxious to replace it with a decent sofa bed.

We slept on a futon for years and have concluded irreversibly that they are just a very flawed concept in bedding! Ours was given to us and we needed a fold out so it suited us too well for years to replace it... we finally have. Not for a perfect solution yet, but honestly, it couldn't possibly be worse. Maybe OK for a 12-year old boy but not for people who have hips or shoulders.

Put something soft on top, definitely. I guess it has to pad at the pressure points while supporting the spine in between... memory foam does flatten with use, and is very heavy for you to handle in between visitors. Eggcrate, regular foam, or a latex topper would probably all be easier.

KarinL

Well by what I saw at ikea I can't tell what under the mattress. I'd say get a three or four inch memory foam (four or five pound rating) and a very large Spacebag that you suck the air out of with your vacuum. Or even a construction grade trash bag and lots of duct tape and suck the air out of it. That way it won't take much space to store it.

We have a nine year old top-of-the-line futon mattress that was starting to not feel so top-of-the-line. We had actually budgeted to replace it, but bought a Costco memory foam topper instead. Boy, are we glad we did! For about $160, we now have a bed that is more comfortable than any bed we've ever slept on. The caveats are: (1) the memory foam stinks to high heaven for about three days, so air it out for sure and (2) it's pretty thick, so I don't know if your futon would still fold up with the memory foam on it.