our DIY upholstered headboard

Like most of our projects in our house, our headboard has been on our to-do list for months, and we finally finished it. We actually did the first cuts back in October, but lost steam before we got any fabric on it.

I’m not going to do a tutorial, because, let’s face it, there’s a zillion of these tutorials out there. In fact, I don’t know who would buy an upholstered headboard, when you can make one so inexpensively. Hundreds of dollars were saved, people.

The shape was inspired by this bed on Glitter Guide. I’m really happy with the end result, but the shape drove us mad. We are apparently really bad at geometry and we didn’t have a compass on hand. We ended up re-cutting and trimming here and there a few times to get it symmetrical. The fabric was originally bought to use as tablecloths at my bridal shower. Not a coincidence, if you’re buying fabric for a one-time-only event, try to think of ways you can reuse it. I love the colors, it fits perfectly with the soft peach color on our wall and the grey adds a bit of masculinity to it, maybe? I may be fooling myself there.

Tutorials we found the most helpful:

Our supplies:

Wood
Batting
Carpet pad (this was left over from carpeting our basement, we added it in for another layer of cush)
1 inch foam
Fabric
Staple gun and staples
Foam adhesive spray
A few hands (I’ve seen tutorials on people doing this single handedly, I recommend recruiting help if you have it)
Nailhead trim
Suggested : A compass is you have curves
Liquid nails (we used this to attached the extra wood pieces to make it thick)

One of our roadblocks in getting this project to the finish line was a disagreement in how best to add a thick edge. I was dead-set on using Kristin’s method from the Hunted Interior. My dad, who has a construction background, thought wrapping fabric around a thin piece of bendable wood and attaching would work. However, you need wood trim in order to use nail head trim, which was the plan. Once that was decided, I just had to convince Billy to do the extra legwork in cutting out the headboard shape for what would be the second time. If we were to do this again, we’d attach the wood first and make the trickier cuts only once.

A few in progress shots:

Our extra wood to make the edge a bit more substantial:

One layer of carpet padding, because we had it:

Then we spray glued the foam on and put the final layer of batting:

And finally, we wrapped it in fabric and stapled it. (sorry no photos). And measured the line for nailhead trim.

There is a specific hammer that you’re suppose to use for nailhead trim, but for this one-time project, I didn’t feel like spending the money. So, we wrapped our hammer in some of the scrap fabric – and it worked great! A note on the nailhead trim, we ordered several trim kits, but the colors were never right. First I ordered Dritz in silver, but we have a lot of brass in the room, and I wanted to pick up those metal tones. So, we ordered the Dritz nailhead in brass – the ‘nails’ were the perfect color, but the strips were a bright brass, like gold. That would not work! I finally found some in a “french natural” and it was exactly what we were looking for.