DIY Painted Wood Headboard

I’ve had several DIY headboards in the last 12 months. Well, actually only three, which, according to my husband, is too many. But this is the first one I am sharing since I hated the other two. I’ll share the crappy ones some day so you can point and laugh, but today I’m gonna share the one I love. It was so super easy, too.

The whole project ended up being $99 bucks, including paint and hardware. We have a king size bed, which is six feet wide and the wood panels at HD come 8ft wide by4ft tall. We cut 2 ft off of the length so the actual headboard is 6ft x 4ft. We started by creating the frame for the headboard out of 2×4’s and connecting them using a Kreg Jig (those things are so awesome, y’all). The top rectangle is 6’x4′ and the legs were about 2 ft. To get that length, I just measured from the floor to the top of the mattress.

Then we attached the 6’x4′ board to the frame.

We could have (and should have) just stopped right there, but instead we added 1×2’s to the edges. If I had planned on staining the whole thing, the 1×2’s would have given it a more finished look, but since this was painted, we really didn’t need to add them, but… I didn’t realize that until we were done.

I traced an 8″ hexagon onto a cardboard box and used it to trace my design onto the wood and then started taping it off. The image below is actually a scrap that I was testing on to make sure this was the route that I wanted to go.

I painted it semi gloss white and then went ahead and ran my sander over it to distress it a bit.

Once the white paint was dry, I started taping off the hexagons and made one slightly off kilter to draw your eye up towards the top.

I just used small paint samples from HD as well as a small can of hickory stain. I also stained the legs to the headboard so they would match the bed and not be so obvious. On some of the hexagons I used a watered down version of the paint so some of the wood grain would show through. I didn’t sand over the hexagons. Then we pulled back the mattress a bit  and screwed the legs directly to the bed frame. If you don’t want to drill through your bed frame, you could always screw this into studs in the wall. Pre-drill.

I also redid the bedding. I made new pillows and pillow shams with flange (you can find that tutorial here). And, if you follow me on Instagram, you might have seen this pic of the death of a Target pouf.

Hey @target, with a $42 price tag, you’d think you’d be able to make your poufs with an insert for easy cleaning when your incontinent dog has an accident. Instead, its a zipper leading to a zipper leading to Styrofoam balls. Cheaply made? Bullseye. @targetdoesitagain Special thanks to @dyson and #hefty for getting this out of my life.

A photo posted by Dena Stormer (@heartsandsharts) on Sep 9, 2014 at 5:04am PDT

Y’all. This pissed me off so bad. How is there NOT AN INSERT IN THIS THING?! Ugh. Bygones.

After I got all of the little balls into two trashbags, I washed the fabric and then just made a throw pillow out of part of it. Not a total loss, but definitely a lesson learned.

The night stands are a rast hack, and the lamps were a thrift score that I shared on my to do list a couple weeks ago. I sprayed them with Rustoleum’s Rusty Metal Primer and then sprayed them with Rustoleum’s Lemongrass spray paint (for more on painting over rusted metal check this out.) Aaaaaaand then I topped them with a Target shade.

You can find the info on the pom pom pillow here.

So, that’s that. I’m pretty glad that I actually (with the help of my bald friend Bob) built this thing. And, (Hubs don’r read this part) if when I decide that we need a new headboard, this will make the perfect frame to upholster.

It’s not the typical “master retreat” you see in all those lovely bedroom images on Pinterest, but, I love it. We don’t have kids so we really don’t feel the need for a “retreat”. Maybe one day, but that’s not today.

Whaddya think?