LifeFromScratch

New Headboard

So the beds in our house have never had headboards. In fact up until last year they were just sitting on the floor. The reason for this is two fold. The first being that having a boxspring and mattress on the floor doesn't bother my husband one bit, and the other reason is that I really wanted something with character, something I want to see every morning and night for a good long while and everything I found was wayyy out of reach on the budget scale. I just haven't been able to justify the expense of spending several thousand dollars on bedroom furniture. SO, I finally decided I would just make one myself. I found a few links to headboards made from old doors like so https://www.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=headboards+made+from+old+doors&term_meta%5B%5D=doors%7Cautocomplete%7C4&len=2&rs=ac and I actually think ours turned out prettier. The first step was to find the right door. I was able to find exactly what I was looking for at a Habitat For Humanity store that we have here in Twin. I have to say husband wasn't at all sold on this project at first but he went along with it and then as is usually the case with him he got really excited and we ended up doing most of it together which was fun. Here is the door we found. SUCH a great find!

From here I just did some light sanding and then lots of scrubbing, it was pretty dirty.

But I guess I should add that before that husband made us a couple of saw horses. Also Grace makes that exact face he is making here, haha cracks me up!

So next we decided to fill the holes from the old door knobs. I noticed on pinterest that a lot of people didn't do that and just left it as part of the "character" of the headboard but it kind of bugged me and I decided I wanted them filled in. So for that we cut out just small circular pieces of wood and then filled them with saw dust and wood glue. Worked awesomely...is that a word? My original plan was to use saw dust and an epoxy, but husband suggested the wood glue and it worked really really well and was easier to deal with than the other would have been.

We had a couple of cute helpers flittering around for most of this. lol

And now you know why most of the pictures are of husband...lol

We filled the ends with the same thing, wood glue and saw dust

Next we added on the legs. I'm not going to go into details for this part, it was a lot of cutting and drilling and screwing in, but I feel like it's pretty self explanatory.

Pretty cute for a messy hooligan that has misplaced her shoes and hairband heaven knows where. ;)

This guy!

After the sawdust mixture had dried really well I sanded it flush with the door before we moved on to picking out trim

More sanding...

And more sanding...

Next we put on the trim. We made 5 different trips to Lowe's for picking out the trim and returned trim we didn't like 3 times. lol

This is what i like to refer to as the ugly stage in the process. I was REALLY doubting if it was going to turn out at this point. We had put too much time into it to turn back but I was getting really nervous.

The trim I ended up deciding on. Husband bowed out after the 2nd return. lol

Working away past bedtime...poor Milla was a good sport that night.

So the next part gets a little tricky. I was worried that the light wood would look differently than the dark wood once it was distressed, but I wasn't about to sand every tiny crevice on the whole thing. SO I decided to stain the lighter parts with a dark stain, and I am really glad I did. The brown shows through on the final product and the lighter would have looked pretty different as is evidenced when you look at the back of the bed.

First coat of chalk paint!!!!

This is the other part of the process where I panicked. After only one coat the brown was still REALLY showing through.

The finished product!!!!

So I got tired of taking pictures at this point but basically this is after another coat of white paint, some hand sanding to give it a distressed look and make the designs stand out, and two coats of wax that I just wiped on with a rag, easy peasy.

It is even prettier in person, I love the way it turned out.

Because it is going in the guest room in our new house and our guest room is currently in our basement, and we didn't want to haul it all the way down there, I just kind of draped the bedding that will be in there, over our own in these pictures. lol So this isn't quite what the guest room will look like, it will need accent pillows etc. but you get the idea! We love it!!!!