So...we sold the furniture to a family on Craigslist (scored some free sod for the backyard from them too!) and I got the idea, from one of my favorite blogs, to make my own head board! It was super easy, super CHEAP, customized to exactly what I wanted and took maybe 2 and a half hours to complete. I took some pictures throughout the whole process so that if you too want to try and make your own you can get motivation from my pics...I'm not kidding it was super easy but ladies just make sure you have a man on hand because I will say the whole last part of it was done all by Matt:)
So here's the bedroom before...cute but dark
We have a queen size bed so we bought some plywood that was about 3/8'' thick and 4' x 8'; we had it cut down at Home Depot, FOR FREE, to 4' x 6'. We used the 6ft side to go across the bed which left about 2in that went out on each side of the bed. I found some super cute fabric at Hobby Lobby that was 30% off (duh) and got 2 yards of it. For the padding you can use different materials but in reading all the blogs out there I found the egg carton padding that you would put over your mattress to be the most padded and cheapest. I bought one full sized pad at Walmart for like $15. You could choose to do a king and cut in half for additional padding but the one was just enough padding in my opinion.
So, you start out by laying out your wood and use some spray adhesive to stick your egg carton bumpy side down on. You can get the adhesive anywhere; we got ours from Home Depot for another job a while back. If you use the same dimensions I did you will have just enough leftover padding on all four sides of the board to be able to fold over for a cleaner, rounded look around the sides and edges. Once you get it laid where you want and sprayed down you then lay out your fabric basically the same way you did the egg carton. *TIP* Solid colored fabric would have been way easier than the print I bought, we really had to work to keep the pattern straight. So if you want easy then pick out something solid!
Once our fabric was in place we carefully lifted it up on one side pulled the foam and fabric over VERY TIGHTLY and prepared to staple. Oh ya and this is where Matt came in very handy, there was no way I could have stapled into this wood myself! You have to use one of those heafty duty staplers for this job and you need to make sure you staple against a wall or something that you can press hard against. If you choose to use a solid colored fabric then you could easily just staple down on the floor but because we had a pattern we had to be able to look at it while we stapled to make sure it stayed straight. Here's Matt in action...PS, there is A LOT of stapling...this part probably took the longest. Make sure when you get to the corners to really tuck in the fabric; I ended up cutting away some of the excess padding and fabric just to keep it from bulking up. Once your done stapling then....your done!! I told you it was easy:)
Here's how it turned out when it was all said and done! It only took a few hours to do the whole thing! We decided to mount it on the wall with some brackets that we got from Home Depot. It doesn't look bad though just sitting behind the bed on the floor. Depends on the look you want:) You could also get even more crafty and add some cute buttons for a tufted look or some large nailheads around the edges of the headboard. But I like to "KISS"...Keep It Simple Students....haha if Dr. White could hear me now (she was a professor of mine in college; this was her favorite motto) haha I chose not to add anything...for now;)
And here it is all set up!! It still looks a little dark in the room but I'm telling you getting rid of the other furniture and doing this really brighted up the space. It feels so much more comfortable too, like Mom and Dad's or Grandma's house. Which is important to me seeing that all my family is back in Houston:) Hopefully this was easy to understand and motivates you to try it on your own!! You never know unless you try...
Love to all, M&K
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