A little over a year ago we inherited my grandmother’s bedroom set which, aside from her china sitting in my kitchen cabinets, is my all-time most prized possession. It’s a beautiful set made from solid mahogany and weighing a million tons. Originally it came with a headboard and footboard for a double bed, but since Matt and I sleep on a queen mattress (a hand-me-down Sterns & Foster from my parents that is quite possibly the world’s greatest mattress, but was too hard for my mom’s back) the headboard and footboard wouldn’t fit. We originally toyed with the idea of mangling up the headboard and footboard to extend wide enough for a queen, but decided not to rip apart a beautiful antique in that manner. Instead, we’re using it for the guest room which has a new double mattress and boxspring.

So for the extent of our marriage we’ve been sleeping on a bed with no headboard which absolutely drives Matt nuts as he likes to lean back and read in bed. Personally I hate that my pillows are always falling down between the mattress and the wall behind it, but that’s neither here nor there.

This weekend we were inspired to make the headboard that we had been dreaming of for a while. I had seen a bunch of upholstered headboards and decided that it needed the following functionality:

1. It had to be tall because we have a tiny bedroom, and I needed something to extend the eye upward making the room look bigger.
2. It had to be tall enough so that when Matt was sitting in bed, it would extend higher than his head so he could lean back against it.
3. I wanted little “wings” on the sides of the headboard that extended down to the floor. I thought this might look cozier and give the whole thing a more solid feel.
4. The wings couldn’t be too deep because we religiously use our bedside tables, and I wanted to be able to conveniently reach my Tums.
5. I wanted nailhead trim!

So we mapped it out and measured how big the whole thing would be. Then it was off to Hobby Lobby to score 4 yards of linen fabric (at $2.50/yd) and batting ($13.99 to cover the wood with a bit extra left over). I had hoped they would have lots of nailhead options, but their selection left much to be desired. So we trekked off to Home Depot to buy the wood.

We decided to go with full sheets of plywood, although I had read you could do something lighter weight with craft board. We wanted this to be sturdy and since it would run all the way down to the floor and be screwed into our bed frame, we bought the thickest sheet of plywood we could. We needed 2 sheets of 4×8 plywood ($40 total) with quite a bit of plywood leftover (good news as I have a design for living room side tables that I want Matt to build!). I was in luck when I walked down the nail aisle and found a whole slew of upholstery tacks to choose from! I wound up picking an antique brass finish, and Matt calculated that we’d need 18 boxes of nailheads. I bought all 20 for about $25 in case I needed extra.

Our total cost was around $95 for supplies as we needed to pick up some extra screws and metal plates. Matt had plenty of staples and a staple gun as well as four big bolts to screw the headboard into our metal bed frame. So we headed home to put her together!

The first half of the project involved Matt measuring and screwing the frame together.

From Daily Daguerreotype

Next we covered the back frame in batting, stapled it down, and did the same thing with the fabric which I had cut to size and ironed. Then we upholstered the wings in the same manner leaving one flap open where Matt could screw them perpendicularly into the back frame. After the wings were screwed to the back frame, we only needed to pull the remaining wing fabric behind the back frame and staple it down.

Then came the nailheads. Hundreds of little nailheads that we individually hammered into the plywood with a rubber mallet. This is a job I would not recommend unless you A) are extremely anal-retentive and B) enjoy going bug-eyed. It’s nearly impossible to get those nailheads in straight, and they frequently have to be re-done. If you’re planning on putting nailheads into ANYTHING, I highly recommend you find an upholsterer who has recently been through a bad break-up… and… yaknowwhati’msayin.

It took us much of both Saturday and Sunday and I’d say we easily put in about 9 hours of work on the headboard, but we are super-psyched with how it turned out. In fact when I was Googling how close to set the nailheads, I found an image of this Nate Berkus Headboard that looks pretty darn similar to ours, except without the tufting.

So are you ready for the After photos which were taken in haste with piles of clean laundry on the bed and disorganized side tables?

From Daily Daguerreotype

From Daily Daguerreotype

The next project on the list is to make curtains to hang behind the bed which I plan to hang high and wide over that window giving the appearance that the window is as wide as the queen-sized bed. I think having a big billowy expanse of curtains behind the headboard will do even more to make the room look taller and will also balance out the very tall headboard.

Whaddya think? Any headboard creators out there who have made their own? Or do you prefer a bed with no headboard?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 1:46 pm and is filed under Daily Daguerreotype, Home Ownership, Stuff I Love. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.