Creating a budget-friendly guest room has been a challenge since we moved into our house last year. Obviously, we wanted to provide our family and friends a nice place to stay but didn't want it to look like our left-over college furniture was just thrown together in the extra room.
We were able to find side tables ($60 each) and lamps with shades ($30 each) at our local HomeGoods store and a duvet set from IKEA ($40 duvet + pillow covers) but kept avoiding spending the money to get a nice headboard or bed.
We are terribly picky and could not find something affordable that we liked, so we decided to try our hand at making our own headboard. Our inspiration was the Ikea MANDAL Headboard but we were looking for something a little bigger and more unique.
To create this DIY Wooden Headboard, all you need is several long 1.25" wide pieces of wood for the horizontal beams, 3 wider pieces of wood for the end and middle vertical beams, several different shades of wood stain containing polyurethane, wood screws, staining brushes, and sand paper.
We wanted the headboard to be somewhat larger than the width of the bed and taller than the IKEA inspiration headboard, so we measured the wood accordingly. We had it precut at the store before purchasing.
After getting all of the supplies together, we sanded each piece of wood. Once we finished sanding, we stained all of the 3 shorter pieces of wood in the darkest color. These would be the ones holding the longer horizontal beams together. Then we stained all of the longer pieces (fronts and sides only) in all of the different colors.
We put approximately 3 coats of stain on each piece of wood. The coats dried pretty quickly, within only a few hours, but it definitely took 3 coats (if not more) to get the color of each stain that we wanted.
After all of the staining (this literally took me HOURS to finish due to my freezing garage and numerous coats needed), we laid the long stained beams in a random pattern so the finished piece would look more unique. Once we got all of the beams in an order we liked, we laid them face down and started to screw the vertical beams along the edge of the horizontal ones. We used an extra piece of wood as a spacer to keep each of the horizontal pieces the same width apart.
We screwed the 2 end pieces first and then screwed the third vertical piece in the middle.
We are in love with the final product! I'm usually a small "DIY-er," and this was a bigger project than I typically take on. Overall, I think we did a pretty good job of using the inspiration to make something that fit our personality and the look of what we wanted for our guest room.
Cost of project: $120
Time involved: 8-10 hours (not including drying time)
