One of my favorite pieces of furniture in our house is coincidentally one that we made.
I feel sooooo Ana White or Joanna Gaines when I say that, ha! But, master carpenters or designers, we are definitely NOT. It was SO easy to make, and super cost-efficient. If you count using some old chalk paint I already had, I’ve got about $30 invested in it. I didn’t follow a tutorial, just the advice of my friend, Rachel, and a little internet research. It’s probably ‘rigged’ in a lot of ways, but, this headboard won’t be moving anytime in the far future, so we made it for the long-term, and made it work for us.
The first thing we did was clean her down realllly good. I don’t have an exact estimation on how old the mantel is, but the house was likely built somewhere between the 30s-50s, based on the newspapers we found ‘lining’ the house under the wallpaper. I love how they just used what they had back then, don’t you? Because of it’s age, it had obvious wear and tear, but I really like the worn look, so it was only a matter of getting the oil and grease spots off.
Once it was good and clean (and dry!), I used some of my leftover Annie Sloan Chalk Paint, and applied two coats. After it was dry, I roughed it up pretty good with some sandpaper, and then applied the wax to ‘seal it’.
The next step was to make a ‘tufted’ insert. I did this by cutting a piece of plywood to fit the gap in the mantel (I let it hang over at least 4-5 inches past the gap on the back side, so we would have room to screw it in. Once I cut my plywood, I covered it with fabric glue, and attached some craft batting from Hobby Lobby on top. You don’t have to worry about it sticking so tight, because you will eventually screw your ‘nail heads’ on and that will lock it in place. I will add, I did two layers of batting because I wanted my ‘tufting’ to appear more obvious. I topped my batting with plain ole’ white upholstery fabric from Hobby Lobby, and secured it by wrapping the corners of the fabric (at least 3-4 inches) behind the back of the batting board, and securing that wrapped fabric with a staple gun. I stapled ALLLLL the way around for extra measure.
Then, we screwed the fabric covered board to the back of the mantel, face down, so the fabric portion faced the front of the mantel. At this point, you are almost done!
‘Tufting’ was the final step in completing the piece, and I did that by measuring and marking where I wanted to add my nail heads first. Then, I took several small screws and drilled in those marks, thus creating the ‘tufts’. I will add to screw these carefully, as the first couple of times, I drilled too fast and twisted some of the fabric up with my screw. Now, you should have a tufted headboard with screws. We’ve had our bed for over 2 years now and I have YET to put nail heads on it (#winning), but when I do, I’m just going to super glue them on the top (#winningagain). Honestly, I might not fool with it all together, because once you put the pillows on when our bed is made, you really can’t even see the tufted part.
The last step, and the biggest behemoth of the project was figuring out how to attach it to the bed. After some research, and consultation with my friend, we decided to just screw ours in the wall. We screwed a 2×6 board into the studs in the wall behind where the bed would go, across the top. You could also screw small boards, down the sides where the mantel legs would stand. Once we had the boards in place, we just screwed the bed to the boards on the wall. We screwed several screws across the top and some down the sides. I covered the tops of the screws with a dab of paint, and honestly, it just blends in with the rustic look I was after. Then, I just pushed our bed frame up against the mantel. You could screw your frame into the mantel, but our frame sits on a rug, and doesn’t really move, so we skipped this step.
And that was it! While we were saving to build, I did several DIY projects on furniture and home stuff to cut back on the costs of filling my new house. Although we did this after we moved it, it was literally one of the easiest projects, and biggest difference-makers I’ve ever done for our home. So now we’ve got a bed with a neat history and it hardly cost us a dime! We salvaged another mantel from that house, and I’m already dreaming of what to do with it….
So the next time you pass by an old fireplace mantel, give that baby a second look!
