Bang Your Head(board)

Three months ago, we rearranged the boys’ bedroom to put their beds on one side of the room and closer together. We threw out the orange-stained headboards from the broken bunk beds, and I decided to live headboard-less for a while until the vision came to me for their beds. The next month was a struggle, because I hate not having something finished, but we also had eleventy million dollars due to the school for registration and student fees the first part of the year, so funding for a furniture overhaul was limited. The room is already very heavy with wood, so our options were well-priced metal or upholstered.

The one thing I have read over again in the DIY blogs that I read daily is that you cannot be afraid to try. So when we (I) decided that we (we) were going to make upholstered headboards for the boys’ room out of plywood, foam and fabric in any shape we wanted, and people kept asking me how I know to do that, I responded with “I do not know that I canNOT do that.” And that’s the trick. You just move straight ahead, eyes on the prize, and give it a shot. Buy a little extra material. Splurge on an extra $12 piece of plywood. It’s going to be okay.

So, here we go.

I told Corey Allbritton that as my birthday celebration, I wanted to make the headboards my birthday weekend. Here’s the thing about doing projects with SSG Allbritton. I always give him a head’s up when I want to do something that I will need his help with (in this case, his summers working in his grandparents’ upholstery shop was going to be handy) and he always agrees to help me. Then when it is time to do the work, he gets rather ornery and cantankerous about it. It’s very unpleasant. He’s rude and I cry but I will not be deterred from my project, so I pretend that I will just do it without him, and he involves himself from the beginning, like the good husband he is.

We were making two twin headboards, and because I like to rearrange rooms, we went with the leg option instead of the mounted-to-the-wall option. We measured the height and width of the headboards we wanted, and then measured for the height of the legs. I read several different blog tutorials about this, all of which used a different thickness of plywood, but we went with ½ inch plywood – sturdy but not too heavy. A family trip to Lowe’s later, we were bringing home plywood for two twin headboards and four legs.

I wanted masculine headboards that still had some curve to them, so I asked Corey to do half-circle cutouts at each corner. I was picturing something round to break up all the straight lines of the furniture in the boys’ room. Mr. and Mrs. Allbritton have two completely different approaches to life. I am a starburst thinker who sees all the pieces thrown up in front of me, giving me the vision of my finished product, while Corey is a linear thinker, who works successfully in ordered steps. I could see the headboards with cutouts at the corners, but damn if I could figure out how to get them there. Enter Corey with his "First this, then that" diligence.

When the lightbulb came on, the word was "fulcrum." He tied a pencil to the end of a piece of cord. We measured where we wanted the cutout to start, which is where he put the pencil. He held the other end of the cord at the corner and drew the semi-circle. The same process on the other three corners gave us three corner cutouts at exactly the same size. The picture will hopefully explain this better than I can.

While Corey was making the cuts to shape the headboard, and Landen was taking pictures of it, Jake and I were covering the legs in fabric using the industrial staple gun.

Corey then attached the legs to the headboard using a 1 ¼ inch bolt and nut. The flat end went toward the wall, while the nut went into the bed, to later be covered by foam.

Foam is really expensive if you have to buy it regular price from the craft store. It comes in different sized squares, so it also hurt my geometry-challenged brain to stand in the aisle at Hobby Lobby and try to figure out how much foam I needed. Excitement took me shopping before fully considering the options for my supplies, because I now know that you buy egg crate pads for beds and double them up. One big square of 2” thick foam is $9 at Hobby Lobby. For about the same price, you can get an entire twin-sized egg crate that you can double up and make a 3” pad. More padding for less money.

On with expensive-ass foam we proceed. Using Aileen’s Tacky Glue spray adhesive to stick the foam to the headboard. It’s also got a terrible reputation for being difficult to cut. Scissors will not work. We used a small saw from one of Corey’s tools. This one is sharp and serrated and can cut a seatbelt.

The next step is to cover the foam with batting. We used two layers of it, but only one round of staples. Thankfully it does not matter what the back of the headboard looks like, because I do not have the patience for perfect upholstery.

It needs to be secure, not neat, which are really my favorite two requirements for a project.

I did not take any pictures of the fabric being stapled to the boards because no one was in the mood for that sh*t. Were I to do this again I would a) not choose a striped fabric for a curved headboard and b) use a fabric for a curved headboard that has a little pull to it. My fabric was an indoor/outdoor fabric - wipeable and genius for the room with boys, but had very little give. Corey's grandparents were upholsterers and he often helped in their shop, so he remembered that cutting slits in the fabric would help. So we pulled and smoothed and stapled and spat at each other (with words, not saliva) and did not enjoy this part at all.

I'm supposed to say here that Corey is a handy emmeffer.

To attach the legs to the headboard, we first measured the distance from the floor to the bottom of the bracket and the head of the bed. Then we used an old piece of cardstock to make a template for where we should drill the holes in the legs. I have zero trust in my ability to measure the same thing the same way four times, and employing a template means that four holes get drilled in the exact same spots on all boards.

So, now the big reveal. I wish more than anything that I could hurry and label this room finished, however, I need art above each bed, and the vision for what that art should be has not yet come to me. I also tried to hang my dearly departed Aunt Soupie's mirror in their bedroom. She raised two sons, so that placement seemed appropriate. However, it is 1960s heavy-as-sh*t, and I put two big holes in my sheetrock trying to do that. There are also smaller places where the stripes from the headboard and the map print from the curtains will be incorporated, like the lampshade between the beds.

The major incentive in this plan is that I did not have to buy any new bedding. The sheets and comforters and quilts and shams have been on the beds and are now soft and sweet-smelling like my boys are when they are sleeping. I had to get new bedskirts, but that added a minimal cost to the project.

The chest is about ten years old, from Bombay Company (how great was that place?) and the mirror is an antique Syrcoco mirror I bought on ebay over a year ago because I really wanted one, but had nowhere to put it. The chest is tall and bowed in the front but a rich wood, so it's perfectly gender-neutral. I used it for years in my pink plaid bedroom. It is one of my favorite pieces of furniture I own, and Landen has professed his eternal devotion to it.

That angle has my favorite things about this room in the same frame: the mirror, the curve of the headboard, Landen's alligator head, Jake's books and a chest that has moved with me across the country.

You can see from the small bit of curtain fabric showing that the reds and greens and yellows and browns of the map pattern are picked up by the same colors in the headboards.

I have been planning to do this headboard project for this weekend for two months, and as an added birthday gift to me, the Internets decided that Sherry and Katie would schedule the Winter Pinterest Challenge at just the perfect time for me to link these headboards to their party! It's the cattle call for all bloggers to complete a project they pinned on Pinterest and post the results in a link party. The idea to do corner cutouts came from this headboard I pinned from Ballard Designs and this post on upholstered headboards. There are four hosts of the Winter Edition of the Un-Official Pinterest Challenge, and they are:

• Sherry at Young House Love
• Katie at Bower Power
• Erin from The Great Indoors
• Cassie from Hi Sugarplum  

So check out their posts from their Pinterest Challenge and see what their readers have also posted. And then get over to Pinterest and pin your own projects, because even though I am pleased with the results of our bravery in headboard-making, this is like the Christmas and birthday wreaths I made. I will never do this sh*t again. Jake and Landen (and their kids and grandkids) will be sleeping on these until the wood rots.