DIY!

Our master bedroom has been neglected for a long time.  Rand and I have never been able to agree on what we want in that room...wall color, furniture, etc.  We decided around Christmas that it was time to paint the walls and add new furniture.  We decided on a grayish sage green and it looks great.  We then decided that we need to make a headboard for our king size bed.  Buying one is WAY too expensive.  I watch a fair amount of HGTV and have come to realize how easy it would be to make an upholstered one.  We looked at different fabrics and of course couldn't find anything we both agreed on.  My friend Kim told me about a DIY website for furniture.  So we checked it out...AMAZING!  How did I not know about this before!  Basically the website has all kinds of wood furniture and the plans for how to make them.  BRILLIANT!  The other cool thing is that people can submit photos of the projects that they have made so you can see different finishes/colors.  We  found a headboard that we both instantly loved and decided to make it a few days later. Originally we were just going to stain it like the website showed, but then we saw a photo of a white version that someone submitted- loved it even more! Now that our walls are green, white furniture will look great. The headboard took an entire week to make because we only worked on it about 30-45 mins. every night (after Avery was asleep). It probably would have only been a 1-2 day project if we had been able to dedicate more time.

Rand did the bulk of the work obviously, but I totally helped out too... a lot ;) I helped with the sanding, and did the painting and lacquering.  Rand did everything else.  Side note:  projects like this should be done during the spring or fall, not winter.  It was freezing in our garage!  I'm pretty sure we picked one of the coldest weeks to do this.  Oh well :)

Here it is half way done...  I should have taken more step by step pictures.  The middle boards are already painted white here. We painted those first so that the paint didn't fill in the cracks in between the slats.

Here it is all finished! After it was painted, we distressed the paint a little and lacquered it.  We played with the idea of putting a brown glaze over the distressed areas so that they would stand out more, but just went without it.

The entire project cost ended up around $80 or $90.  That is including a few small tools that we needed to purchase as well.  Not bad huh?  There is a very similar headboard in the Pottery Barn catalog- only it is $800 not including shipping!

  We even have wood left over for our next project... Matching night stands!

P.S. the wood furniture website is ana-white.com