The past few months have been so busy! I was finishing up my MBA and had my world turned upside-down by being selected as a juror on a month long criminal trial. Now that life has settled down, the trial is over and my diploma in hand, I have finally gotten these hands on some DIY projects!
(bare bones!)
Our bedroom has stayed largely untouched since we moved into our apartment. One thing we have tossed around to amp-up our bedroom style is to get a headboard. With a king size bed, a headboard comes at a hefty price. I have been diligent in keeping an eye out for one on Craigslist or the thrift store, but have come up blank.
This Sunday I woke up and was browsing Pinterest when I quickly became consumed with redesigning our bedroom that same day! We settled on a rustic wooden headboard and some new bedding to bring a nautical feel to the bedroom to match the rest of our home. This tutorial was the foundation for my design.
We started out by going to Home Depot for wood. Every post I had read said to use pine, but I found pine to be completely out of my price range. What we did find in the lumber section was some Douglas Fir, a quick Google search showed that it should respond well to stain, so we took the dive and got it! We got 6 boards for the headboard and two boards for the legs. The large boards were 8 ft long and 2 x 6 inch and rang in at $5.38 each. We also got two 2 x 4 inch boards for the legs which were about $2.50 each. We also picked up a can of Minwax stain in English Chestnut, and a 25 pack of 2 1/2 inch screws.
Once we got it home we sanded down the front of the wood that would make the face of the headboard. When picking out the boards, I went for whatever was cracked and knotty because I wanted the headboard to have character.
Once sanded it was time to stain. We have food safe gloves that we use when cooking, so I used those to keep my hands clean from the stain. (Side note: I knocked over the can of stain during the staining process which caused half the can to pour onto my arm and into the glove! You can only prepare so much!) I used an old sock to apply the stain by dipping the sock into the can and just rubbing it into the wood. Because the wood was fresh and took stain well I didn't need to brush it on and then wipe it off, I just simply wiped it on. A great tip I have learned from one of my favorite shows "Rehab Addict" is to pretreat your wood with water to help it soak in the stain. To do this, I used a wet paper towel to wipe down each board just before I stained it so that the wood was moist, but not wet.
This was the wood just after staining. I stained the front, both ends, and the sides of all the boards. Even if you feel the legs of the headboard might not show it is a good idea to stain them. The large boards will have spaces in between which will show through to the legs, and on our bed the legs did show on the edge of the bed. After staining we put on a coat of polyurethane and let the boards dry overnight. You can poly inside but it absolutely stinks and will make you house smell a lot longer than you might like it to!
We were finally ready to assemble, and this is where our project took a turn for the worst (#obstacles). I am not sure whether we had an uncharged drill or a weak drill, but we could barely drill pilot holes in our wood, and were completely unable to screw the boards together. We ended up renting an impact driver from Home Depot for $15 for four hours. That was the best $15 we spent because after we had working tools the project came together FAST.
I lined up my 6 boards the way I wanted them to look, and then flipped the boards over long ways to maintain the direction of the boards. For each board we used 4 screws, two into each leg for a total of 24 screws. We measured the distance of the edges of our bed frame (74 inches) in case we later decided to try and attach the headboard to the frame. At this time it is standing behind our bed just fine without being secured. Since this is not our permanent home and we have a lot of storage under our bed, it didn't make sense for us to attach it to the frame because the bed is moved fairly often.
Once you have this distance you will calculate where to position your legs. I drew a diagram to help myself understand where to place the legs on the boards:
Take the length of the headboard (84 inches) and the distance between your frame ends (74 inches). The difference between the two measurements is 10 inches. This is how much extra space you have TOTAL, but we need to divide that space to be on each side of the legs so we divide that number in half. This gives us 5 inches in from either side. This point needs to be in the middle of our legs. Since our legs are 4 inches wide, we want to find that midpoint. Again divide that in half and get 2. From this point we know that from the midpoint of the boards will be two inches towards the edge, which means that the edge of the board should be 3 inches from the edge. This 2 inches of leg, and 3 inches of headboard add up to be that 5 inch edge space we needed in the beginning. I STRONGLY recommend you draw out your image to help visualize what you will need to do!
For the legs, you would adjust the height according to your own bed. Our bed was about 2 1/2 feet tall, so we put our legs 2 inches from the top of the headboard, and three inches from each side as we calculated just now. I marked around the whole leg with a pen to make sure the leg was in the right place. We went down each leg with two screws per board and we were done!
This smile says it all! We were able to overcome the hurdles and built this headboard for under $60. Below is a picture of the headboard and leg without the bed:
Here you can see that the headboard is just standing on its legs against the wall. We also painted our wall in Behr's Sterling paint. It is a wonderful light grey color which worked perfectly in our bedroom which doesn't get a ton of light. It is important to account for the lighting when picking any color paint or stain. As you can see, the headboard color is completely different in the shadows of our bedroom.
With that here is our finished product. I think this design balances nautical, feminine, and masculine aesthetics. I try to be sensitive to the fact that a man lives in this home too!
Thanks for stopping by!
No comments:
Post a Comment