Ari's Room: Plank Headboard (plus new bedding)

When we first started planning Ari's room makeover, I mentioned that we were contemplating either a pallet wall or headboard. I guess the picture above is kind of a spoiler...we went with headboard. I also did enough reading about the potential chemical laden scariness of pallets to decide to play it safe and buy brand new wood instead, seeing as how it was going to be right next to Ari's developing brain and all.

This is what Ari's bed looked like before:

Basic wooden headboard, twin sized bed, sqeaky bedframe....

We wanted something more exciting and he wanted a bigger, less squeaky bed. Right next door, we had a rarely used queen bed in the guest room. The deal we wound up striking with Ari was that he could have the queen bed, but he'll need to give up his room and bunk with a brother or two on an air mattress when we have guests (well, until Abe moves into the guest room, Ari's old bed is in there and he can just sleep there).

This was a pretty simple project. We bought three ten foot long 1x8 whitewood planks at Home Depot. Queen mattresses are 60 inches wide, so we just got each board cut in half at the store so that we ended up with just the right amount of wood--no waste! Each board was $12, and we already had everything else we used (sandpaper, stain, and anchor screws), so the total cost of the headboard was $36.

Dave sanded down the planks and stained them with Minwax dark walnut:

We let them dry and air out for a couple of days.

Then there was the measuring:

Also, look what happened to Ari's dresser! Boo! We have to fix it:

We made sure the first board starts well below the mattress so that you can't see it. Dave experimented with having kids hold the first board level, but it kept slipping, so he built a makeshift plank holder instead:

We used anchor screws to hold it up. This might have been overkill, as the wood is very light, but, again....developing brain!

We considered various possibilities for filling in those screw holes and covering up the screws, but Dave doesn't think the little caps you can buy and sand down will work, and, in our experience, wood putty won't stain to the same color as the wood, and I was afraid it would stick out more with wood putty than with exposed screws. So we're leaving it as is for now. If it bothers us too much, we'll figure something out later.

The other problems we ran into were some gaps in between the planks (one very noticeable one, but not so noticeable once pillows are in front of it) and warped boards not laying flat against the wall. Again, we'll see how much these things bother us before we decide whether or not to try to fix them (I was not really a perfectionist about this part!) At the moment I kind of feel like they're things you only notice if you're looking for them. But maybe I'm just not terribly observant.

Then we did some bed switching and Ari had his new, huge bed with headboard! I'm a little concerned about the scale of it with the relatively small furniture (and relatively small room!) but I think it's going to work out okay. It will have to, really, because it's done now! Well. We could always take one plank off the top to make the headboard itself a little less imposing.

I've had my eye on the Ikea duvet cover for awhile now. As soon as I spotted it last time we were there I thought it'd be perfect in here. And at $29.99 for the duvet cover and 2 pillowcases, the price worked, too. We already had the comforter to go inside of it. I picked up a few more pillows at Ikea and gave Ari one of the gray throws (also from Ikea) we had in our room (you might recognize it from Abe's monthly photo shoots).

We still need a bed skirt, as you can see.

Getting close in here! We need to hang things on the walls, and we have one more big DIY project that I'm hoping to work on this week and finish over the weekend. And some fun accessories, but I'll probably just pick those up as I come across them (I need to start getting out to garage sales on Saturdays!)

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