Extra-Wide Headboard How-To

Yesterday I shared our finished bed. As you'll recall, I devised an extra-wide headboard based on this inspiration to make sense of the low walls and pitched ceilings in our attic bedroom. Today I'm sharing the headboard how-to. Read on for my step-by-step and lots more pics.

In a sentence: The headboard is a number of upholstered 1x8s placed edge-to-edge and framed out with mitered 1x4s. My full supply list included:

From the hardware store:
13 - 1x8s cut to 52" long
2 - 6' long 1x4s
1 - 10' long 1x4
3 - 8' long 1x3s
12 regular mending plates
2 L-shaped mending plates
lots of wood screws
paint
lots and lots of staples

From the fabric/craft store:
5 yards of upholstery fabric
low-loft quilt batting
high-loft quilt batting
spray adhesive

Tools:
electric drill
hand saw
miter box
staple gun

Oh, and a big ole tip about these supplies: 1x8s are not, in fact, 8" wide. They're more like 7", so yeah, remember that. I hadn't realized that whilst making my purchases, but it worked out to be wide enough anyway.

I had each 1x8 cut at the hardware store to 52". I cut both my upholstery fabric and the low-loft batting into strips a couple of inches bigger all the way around than each 1x8, so about 56" long by about 11" wide, and the high loft batting to the same size as my 1x8s or 52" long by about 7" wide.

I affixed each strip of high-loft batting to a 1x8 using a bit of spray adhesive. Using a staple or two would be fine too, but I wanted to make sure I kept everything smooth.

Next, I wrapped each 1x8 in a strip of upholstery fabric layered with a strip of low-loft batting, and stapled my heart out. If you remember the great green chair upholstery debacle of 2012, you'll recall the I almost lost a hand using a manual staple gun, so I was super excited when my dad broke out the electric bad boy you see here. It's pretty much a must-have for a project this big, and apparently, they're not that expensive (see here), which makes me wonder why I've been messing around with my dinky manual one all these years. But I digress... Anyway, the high-loft batting gives some padding, and the addition of a layer of low-loft batting gives a tad more but more so helps to smooth it all out -- including the edges.

Once they were all upholstered, we laid them edge-to-edge face down on the floor. Now, this is important. Make sure the top edges are all completely in line. Kick the edges against one of your unused 1x4s or 1x3s to get them all perfectly lined up. To attach them to each other, we evenly spaced the three 1x3s along the back and screwed them into the back of the upholstered 1x8s. Make sure you pick out screws that are just shorter than the two boards together. You don't want to poke right through the upholstery...right? Oh, and please disregard all of my shoes strewn about, won't you? To avoid having to try to figure out how to get this monster up the stairs, we built it in our bedroom, which I did not prioritize cleaning for this little impromptu photo shoot.

Once the 1x8s were all attached to one another, I measured the finished headboard to determine the size of the frame and cut the 1x4s to size. I used a simple hand saw and miter box to create the 45 degree angles.

I gave the edges a light sanding.

Before assembling the frame, I painted the boards using some extra trim paint that I had around.

With the frame placed around the headboard, we screwed the frame pieces to one another using L-shaped mending plates.

Finally, we affixed the frame to the headboard using a whole bunch of regular mending plates - 12 total, I believe. Same deal with the screws as earlier...which means these screws needed to be half as long as those we used earlier. Depending on your situation, you may be able to hang the headboard directly onto the wall or affix it somehow to your bed frame. We used L-brackets to affix it to the ceiling.

All told, all the supplies - excluding the tools and paint that I already had - came out to just under $200, and I actually had quite a bit of the upholstery fabric left over and the cut-off ends of the 1x8s that I'm looking to use on some random projects here and there. Not the cheapest, bargain-basement project I've ever undertaken, but also not bad at all for a custom headboard that I'm unlikely to ever find in a store. I honestly couldn't be much happier with it, and I think it does the inspiration headboard proud.