Headless

Hello folks,
It's been a while.  Life just took me away on a whirlwind adventure of busy-ness, but I'm fighting my way back to sanity.  And blogging.  And half-way through writing this post, our computer had a breakdown and is currently refusing to stay on for more than about 43 seconds. But here I am, publishing this post that's taken two and a half weeks to write. Yikes.  I hope you enjoy it.

In my very first post, I said that I wanted to share with you the process of making our headboard.  Well, today is the day.  No more dilly-dallying.

First, let me tell you about my love affair with my bed: I love my bed.  I'm pretty sure it's the comfiest bed in the whole wide world.  If my bed could understand it, I would present it with a #1 BED trophy.  Or dedicate a day to celebrate it.  Or write a sonnet.  Or something.  I love crawling into it after a long day and curling up in between the fluffiness of the pillow topper and the down blanket.

But for many years (okay, a year and a half) our bed had a problem.  Don't get me wrong, I was still in love with it, but there was a big issue.  It had no head.  (board.)  There was nothing to stop pillows from being lost in the deep dark abyss between the bed and the walls.  Nothing to stop us from hitting our heads on the window sill when we were sitting up in bed reading.  And nothing to make our bed look as wonderful as it felt.

Here's how it originally looked.  Dark.  And lifeless.  And Dark.

With a guitar and a cute puppy.

Then I got sick of how dark it was and bought us some beautiful light soft linen bedding for my birthday.  And it's wonderful.  But it made our room look very very VERY vanilla:

Vanilla bedding.  Vanilla walls.  Vanilla floors.  Vanilla lampshades.  Cute hubby.  Random red pillow.

But that's all changed now.  When my parents were visiting a couple months ago, we put them to work.  Warning: If you come to visit us, there will be no site-seeing or relaxing.  Just hard work.  But we'll feed you well.  No worries.  And ok, maybe you can relax a little.  My parents were willing subjects.  They said that they wanted to help us out with "a project around the house" but since we don't own the house, that limits what projects we can do.  So we decided to build the headboard that had been floating around in my brain for months.  My plan was a hybrid of Ana White's knock-off Mason headboard and my imagination. It was part genius, part insanity, part miscalculation, and part do-able.  Here's my initial drawing:

Beautiful, isn't it?  Can't imagine how I ever could have messed that up...  (please pick up on the sarcasm that was written with.) But we jumped right in and got to work.

Step #1 (not on the drawing, in real life.) was buying materials.

We headed out to buy some fabric, some foam, some wood, and a few other miscellaneous items.  After spending an hour in Joanns discussing what fabric to get with the Hubs, we decided on something I never would have chosen on my own (my tastes lean towards the plain, almost boring stuff), a beautiful green fabric with brown stitched flowers.  We wanted our headboard to have some comfy depth to it, so our plan was to go above and beyond batting and put some 2" foam underneath the fabric.  When we went to grab the foam, the price stopped us in our tracks.  After tossing around ideas, we saw that next to all the fancy foam were those egg-crate shaped foam mattress toppers.  We did the math and liked the price of those WAY better than the normal foam (less than half the price for the yardage we needed), so we snatched it up like popsicles at a pool party.

We then went to Home Depot (I'm usually a Lowe's girl, but Home Depot was right next to Joann's) to buy everything else we needed.  We had them cut everything for us right there in the store.

Step #2 was covering our plywood with the foam and the fabric.

This step took us all of about 15 minutes.  First I ironed our fabric (on a very low setting) to get any wrinkles out.  Then we cut our foam to size, laid it bumpy-side-down on the plywood and stapled it around the edge in a couple places.  If you're going to do this, you won't want to staple the foam anywhere other than the edges unless you want the fabric to look all dimpled.  This stapling is just meant to hold the foam in place until the fabric is in place.

Once the foam was in place, we laid the fabric right side down, then laid the ply wood with the foam centered on top of that.  Then we simply drew the fabric tight and stapled it in place.  Here's what it looked like when we were done with that step:

At this point, we could have slapped some legs on the sucker or mounted it right to the wall and been done, but i had a much more complicated vision of a pretty wood frame around it, so we kept going.

Step #3 was preparing the boards.

That means sanding.  And sanding some more.  And sanding just a liiiiiiittle bit more.

Once the boards were sanded and cleaned, it was time to stain them.  We chose to white wash them so they'd contrast nicely with the heavier fabric and kinda match the lighter, casual feel of our bedding.  

Then we had to stop and watch and take pictures of the guys chopping down our neighbor's tree.  Feel free to include this step as needed.

Cool, huh?
Once the boards were sanded, cleaned, and stained and the tree was down next door, it was assembly time.  Here they are ready-to-go on our floor, photographed with my wonderful, high-quality iPhone in our wonderful highly-lit living room:

(again, please tell me you got the sarcasm) 

We used all 1x3's except for the 2x4 crown.

For the assembly, we followed Ana White's plans, just substituting her horizontal slats for our plywood, foam, and fabric.

Yay teamwork!

The only other way we strayed from Ana White's plan was using good ole screws instead of a pneumatic nailer.  Don't get me wrong, I would've gladly done that, we're just still gonna have to save the moo-lah for a while before we buy the air compressor.  We didn't fill any of the wholes, because we were lazy because we only attached boards from the sides and back, which are well-hidden in our room. 

Once the headboard was assembled, the Hubs drilled holes in the legs to line up with our bed frame, ran a couple bolts through each leg, and we were done!

Between building the headboard and finally hanging curtains (curtains from Target- $10 a panel and curtain rods from Marshall's- $15 a rod), our room went from very vanilla to SO MUCH BETTER! 

And our bed is no longer headless.

Some day I'll fill the slight crack between the crowning 2x4 and the rest of the headboard (see that little bit of daylight in there?) but to be honest, it probably won't happen any time soon. 

Here's a close-up of one of the corners.  I like white-washing better than painting, because you still get to see some of the wood grain and all the knotty little imperfections. 

 

My advice for you if you're taking on this project?

-buy the best lumber you can- check it for warping by laying it flat on the floor of whatever store you're buying it from.  Our laziness in this step caused us to have some great lumber and some horribly warped lumber.

-take your time in the sanding/staining/finishing process- it makes a huge impact on the finished product.

-be careful of sanding the ends of boards too much, as this can throw off your measurements.

-thank your helpers a lot.  food, hugs, cards, money, and kisses are usually acceptable forms of thanks.

-keep the dog off the bed while you're taking pictures or they'll look like this:

Overall, this project took 2 days and around $200.  Totally worth it to me.  The room is still a work in progress but walking into it now makes me smile instead of putting me in a beige-induced coma. 

I think it was well worth it. 

Can't wait for Mom and Dad to come visit again!