DIY King Size Headboard

Hey Guys! So as I previously mentioned, Todd and I are tight in the pocket area since we bought our house back in October. After we got married, we quickly upgraded to a king size bed which has been heaven. The problem with a king size bed are the king size prices for furnishing it. We have had this bed for close to 4 years and still have not gotten a headboard or anything for it. It is on one of those metal frames with a bed skirt around it. I finally decided that now that I have a house where i can work outside (not an apartment), I was going to make myself my own headboard. So, I started researching. From everything I could see, it is pretty simple and less than $100. My kind of DIY project...

For me, it all comes down to budget (even though I often times stray from it). The reason is that Todd and I discuss all our expenses and decide what is reasonable to do and not do. Think of Todd as my voice of reason...kind of... lol.

Coming from an apartment, I have virtually no hand tools so I had to budget for everything. So here was my list of things

1. Plywood (large enough for king size) 40x80 was what I ended up using. I estimated about $20 for it but I ended up getting it for free from my father-in-law (who saved by butt with his collection of tools)
2. Batting, foam or both?? FOAM IS EXPENSIVE!!! Again, I'm a budgeter so I had to figure something else out. I took a trip to Jo-Ann's Fabrics and saw they had really wide 1/4 inch thick batting that was on sale. I ended up buying 3 yards and folded it in half to make it thicker on top of the plywood. Making 3 layers still would have been cheaper than buying foam for that size headboard. I stuck with two layers. We have pillows behind us anyways so I wasn't too concerned about the headboard being really fluffy. That being said, it actually is extremely comfortable! (phew). It cost about $12 for the batting.
3. I originally bought those chain nail heads that you nail in every 3 or 4 heads. Needless to say, I returned them. I bought the ones at JoAnn's with a coupon that came out to $14. Took it home and every single one I TRIED (being the operative word) to nail in, the nail head broke off. NIGHTMARE! I ended up using 4 boxes (20 pk) for $1.30 each.
4. Good quality material (3 yards) that wont tear on the edges of the plywood. I budgeted for about $15-$20 but ended up spending $33 because I ended up saving on other things and splurged a bit.
5. A staple gun. I borrowed an electric one from my father-in-law but after countless jams and misfires I decided to just spend the $15 at home depot and buy the heavy duty silver arrowhead. IT WORKED AWESOME!!! You need a bit more strength behind you but it works like a charm. I also bough extra staples (10mm) for I think $2. One box.
6. I borrowed my father-in-laws jigsaw and blades but was gonna spend about $30 on amazon. (Like I said earlier, my father-in-law saved my butt and pocket).
7. A tape measure (which I actually had myself).
8. Some sand paper (I also had)
9. A pen or pencil
10. A regular hammer (I didn't bother buying the rubber hammer)
11. A tack hammer (had one I bought at a thrift store for $1
12. Some string or a compass
13. A friend to help :)

The total cost of the project should have been somewhere around the $100 (with all the tools) mark but I ended up spending about $68.00. 

So here are the steps I took.

1. I highly recommend getting your plywood cut for you if possible to the size needed. I have a King size bed and ended up cutting my plywood length down to 77". I did this using my jigsaw to do this because I didn't have a table saw. I practiced first before cutting because I had never used one before. I highly recommend this. Once you get the hand of it it's fine. 

(you can see that here I used the leg hold method. lol. It helped me keep the board sturdy while cutting)

2. Once we had the plywood cut to size we had to figure out how to make the corners even. Some

people trace buckets but call me old fashion, I used a string and pen. We first measured 1/3 of the sides, then decided on 1/4 of the size because the curves looked to deep. We ended up going down about 

13 1/2"

3. Once we got the right place, we tied a piece of string to a pen and created out own compass. While Brianna held the string, I used the pen to create our cutting radius. We repeated the same process from the opposite corner.

4. We then followed the lines with the Jigsaw and ended with my desired Belgrave shape. We took the sandpaper and sanded the edges a bit so it wouldn't be so rough.

5. The next step was laying the plywood on top of the double layered batting.

6. I cut the corners out so that it would be easier to wrap around the plywood. I cut a small slit in the middle to make the material more flexible in the curve part.

7. The started the stapling. I started with an electric stapler but ended up buying a heavy duty Arrowhead one instead which worked awesome!

(me cutting the excess off)

(with the batting on. Now for the Material)

8. Similar to the process of putting the batting on, we proceeded with putting on the material.

(we cut off some of the excess so that there wasn't too much material to work around. I can probably make a pillow with the excess material.)

(you can see that we cut slits into the edges so that it would fold easier around the edges)

(Baby Parker was standing by rooting us on!)

Yay!!!

9. The last but most certainly NOT least was adding on the nail head trim. As I mentioned earlier, I wanted to use the chain nail heads. But when I hammered each one in, the nail head kept breaking off. I ended up returning it and buying these single upholster nail heads. I bough 5 but I only used 4 (exactly with 3 bad ones...my mistake). This was the hardest step and these are the tools I used:

(I held the nail head with the needle nose pliers and hammered in with the tack hammer. Make sure you use some force or it won't work. I was pretty freaked out at first too so don't worry. One the nail head was pretty far in, I hammered it in the rest of the way with the big hammer.

 A few hard hits and they were in.)

(I kept the tape measure near by and measured every 2". Honestly, some of the nail heads went in crooked but without looking up close, you can't even tell. 

A bit of hammering them in place an they are perfect.)

9. Once I was done with the border it looked really bland because it's so big so I added my version of tufting with the last 7 nail heads I had. I measure to the middle of the top then went down about 14" and nailed in one nail head. Then I measured to the left and right 12" and nailed two there. I now had three on the top row. Then I measured between two of the three to find the middle of that (6")and went down 12" from there and hammered in another nail head. I then repeated the process of the top row of 12" each way to get 4 total on the second row. 

I now had my finished product!

Looks awesome! Hope this encourages some of you to try it out. Be creative and have fun with it!

I'll post a pick of it finally up and update this posting on how Todd and I put it up