headboard // diy

When Ryan and I bought our house back in November, it was move in ready with very few "major" changes that needed to be made. Most changes were preferential. In the past few months the only projects we have done besides decorating, were painting one wall in my office, painting Ryan's basement studio, and screwing in our hanging nightstands.  That way of life however, is starting to change.  We are finding more inspiration now that our house is a home and we are finally finding agreement in style choices.  


Ryan is obsessed with Evernote, so one night we decided what we were going to do, was make a list for each room in separate evernotes. We would write exactly what we expected the outcome to be and find photos to make note of what we were visualizing in our minds.  We started with our bedroom. 


Our bedroom is the one room in the house that we have put off all together. As long as there was a bed to sleep in, it didn't matter what it looked like, because no one ever saw it.  False! We saw it! And we were starting to feel antsy about how cold and mis-matched everything in that room was.  Here was our checklist for the new space:

Paint the walls grey. Possibly with a purple undertone.

Build a head board out of plain jane lumber. Stain it and hang it.

Change the knobs on the built ins.

find a beautiful basic rug, preferably a nice creamy color of some sort.

get rid of clutter and pick out matching lamps for our night stands.

and make a pillow for the window seat.

Now I present to you steps one and two of our list! As always my photos are iPhone photos and the lighting in our house is low and not always the most forgiving to house shots. Okay okay, I am making up excuses for finishing our project at night, never a good time to take indoor photos with poor lighting. It's all my fault.

1. Tape and patch and paint.
what used to be the common robin egg's blue is now...

behr perfect taupe

2. Welcome puppy to the new grey room. 

3. Stain 20 1x2x8 framing lumber slats and 2 1x6x4's.

we used Minwax Red Oak // 1 coat

oh and don't let this photo fool you. we stained all of the wood in the basement with poor ventilation.

we were kooky, thats for sure. 

4. Line up all of the lumbar in the room you will be building in.

it's easier in our case to build in the room, rather than outside, because of the angles and measurements

of the hallways and doorways.

5. Measure inward from the ends of the 8 foot lumber 

to find your perfect placement of the two base boards.

We chose 21.5 inches in.

Make sure the top of the 8 foot lumber is flush with the top of the base boards and nail in.

We used 1 and 3/4 inch nails.

6. Using one of the 8 foot pieces of lumber on it's side, place against first nailed in piece 

and place the second piece to be nailed in on the other side of the sideways lumber.

This will insure that each slat has the exact same space between it and it's neighbor. 

7. After all of your pieces are nailed in, find the placement on the wall that pleases your eye.

For us we had two nightstands already in place 

and knew that we wanted it to look like it was all one piece.

We allowed the headboard to rest 8 inches on both nightstands.

We used 3 screws on the right and 4 on the left and made sure there were studs in the wall to screw in to.

The headboard will not budge, ever!

8. Our bed is on wheels and was pushed to the opposite side of the room

so once the headboard was hung we just had to scoot our big ol' bed back to where it belongs.

and voila a $55 dollar headboard that took a little bit of time, a lot of patience and 2 Hisers to create...

and since we haven't found matching lamps, I used this sweetie from another room.

We fell in love with how it looked with the bed, so now we are searching for just 

the right statement piece to put on my night stand.

any questions?

Just email me. Laurenwhiser@gmail.com.

I will gladly answer any how to, need to knows.

love

Lo.