Custom Headboard

A little over a year ago my husband and I moved into our first HOUSE...not an apartment, not a town home but a real brick house.  We were so excited to finally have a real place to call ours and only ours.  The only drawback was there were so many rooms I just didnt know how I was going to fill each room, but one thing was for sure, I wanted a new mattress...a KING mattress.  For those of you sleeping on a queen right now you can relate to this.  My husband is not a small man, so on the queen bed I was lucky to have 1 inch to call my own space.  I really hate being touched when Im sleeping, yes I know Im crazy but thats just how I am.  So this queen bed was a NIGHTMARE for sleeping, plus the mattress was way past the "8 to replace" so I justified it that way too.  Well let me tell you, we went to Mattress Firm and go a Latex/Memory Foam hybrid mattress and O...M...G it is like heaven on earth.  It does get hot at night, but Ill take sweaty for a back that doesnt hurt in the morning.  So anyway, I have this big awesome king sized mattress (for under $700 by the way) and no frame to go with it...ok I have the ugly metal thing from the mattress place but no pretty headboard and what is a room without a bed set.  I was looking in Potterybarn's magazine (always a bad idea if you are looking to furnish a home on a budget) and saw this awesome headboard for $1200.  I wanted to share a link with you but I dont think they make it anymore because I cant find it.  Well I didnt have $1200 to spare so I thought it would be brilliant to make our own, I mean my dad is handy with carpentry, and my husband (at the time) is always up for a project, so we set out with the plans.  I searched online for a great tutorial but there really wasnt one, but I did find one on how to do the tufting so I went with that and let the boys do the cutting on their own. 

I have been sitting on this post for a while because honestly I didnt want to type everything out and I didnt have step by step pictures to show and this really does need step by step pictures.  Well wouldnt you know, over at Schue Love they did the exact same thing (sort of) and had the tutorial for you.  I wanted to link up to their site so you can check out Schue Love's amazing site and see her far superior job of tufting.

You can see mine here isnt really tufted, see the girls at Schue Love are so smart, they used zip tipes to hold the tread in place.  Well I have to tell you I had a few bloody fingers that day from trying to hold the string REALLY TIGHT to get the tufting look and then stapled, yes thats right I said stapled, the tread to the back of the headboard.  It was not easy, it was frustrating, and in the end it didnt look 100% like I wanted it to, but I made it from scratch and I was proud of it.  I wanted to add my own notes to the Schue Love tutorial so check them out and then check my notes.

First, I wanted the awesome Potterybarn pattern for my headboard so we sketeched it out paper then went to the plywood.  An awesome trick to make perfect circles is tie a string to a pencil, hold down one end of the string to the center of where you want the circle and then the end that has the pencil you draw your circle.  Really cool right!  Well doing the half circles and straight lines was a little harder to make them perfect but it took a lot of measuring and eyeballing.  I totally stand by the mantra "Measure twice cut once".  Dont ever forget this because it will save you so much money in wood (which is more expensive then I remember)!  Once everything is traced get the jigsaw and get going!  We used a jigsaw because of the non-straight lines we had on the headboard, but it you are just going to do a square you can just use a regular saw (its easier and faster than the jigsaw trust me)

While the boys were outside cutting the wood I was inside prepping my "upholestry station".  I found this beautiful white micro-suede in the upholestry section of JoAnn's and bought 6 yards of it (we all know I buy WAY too much fabric, I ended up only using about 3yards).  I first laid down the fabric face down, the added the egg crate mattress pad thing...do you guys know what Im talking about?  Its the  yellow thing that is at walmart that goes on your bed to help with your back.  Well rather then spending the hefty price tag of the padding at JoAnn's I bought one of those to use as the padding.  In retro-spect I should have gotten 4 to make the padding ticker but I bought 2 (I needed each to sit next to each other so I could get it wide enough for the headboard).  Also while I was at JoAnn's I found some awesome clear crystal buttons that I thought would be so much more fun than upholstered buttons on the headboard so I got those too.

Back on track, so I have the fabric and the mattress pad laid out, now I put the plywood on top and get to cutting.  I start cutting around headboard, not listening to the mantra I just told you to never forget.  I think thats why my tufting didnt come out super great.  Like I said go to Schue Love , they have a much better tutorial on how to do the tufting but let me share my mistakes with you.  First was I cut the fabric and then second was I stapled the fabric to the back of the headboard before I did the tufting.  You can see from the other tutorial that they didnt cut the fabric or staple the fabric until AFTER they did the tufting.  Im realizing that now and kicking myself for not doing that.  But I do love my headboard and I did it pretty much without any instruction.  This was also pretty much my intro to home projects and I have to say Im proud of it.  Evern though there are things I could have done better, there are things I could have done much worse too.

I bet your wondering how to hang this bad boy...Well I'll tell you, you need special hardware and its hard to find it.  Eventually we found it at Ace Hardware.  I dont remember the name but its interlocking plates.  One plate is screwed into the wall and the other is screwed into the headboard.  You will want to get 2 sets to have one plate set on each side of the headboard to make it super escure.  WARNING: its pretty hard matching this plates up headboard to wall so be patient and definately have someone help you because two people are usually better than one.

I hope you enjoyed this post and are super PSYCHED to get started on your own headboard!  Have you made a headboard?  I would love to see what you came up with, share it here!!

Project Housewife Out!