Upholstered Headboard

About a year ago I mentioned that Robert had built us a platform bed.  Since then we knew that we wanted an upholstered headboard to go with it.  Since we have a California King bed it's not as easy to find things for it compared to having a queen bed.  Looking online it was hard to find CF as an option, and when I did it was $500+ which was more than we wanted to spend.  I knew we'd need to just make our own.  I talked to my aunt Pam who has made a few different varieties of upholstered headboards and felt like we were up for the project.

Pepaw came over, and Robert and I discussed designs with him.  We decided on a camel back design.  Pepaw was in charge of cutting out the wood backing.  I wasn't involved in this, but of course he made it seem easy.  Miraculously the wood fit into my SUV so we were able to move it easily from his house to ours.

We made a trip to JoAnn Fabrics to purchase 2" thick foam and quilt batting.  We used an entire roll of the foam, so if you have a smaller bed you could ask them to measure out how much you need without having to purchase the whole roll.  One bag of quilt batting was more than enough.  Thankfully, both items were 50% off, plus we had a coupon for an additional 20% off.  Our JoAnn's doesn't have much upholstery fabric, and it all seemed pretty expensive, so we went to a local fabric store call FM.  It had so many options!  I went with a woven gray material that was only $6.99/yard, and I got 2.5 yards.  I wanted something pretty plain since our bedspread is very colorful.

When we got home we laid the foam on the wood and cut it out to fit the wood by using an electric kitchen knife.  It cut very easily.  We left the foam 1/2" wider than the wood all the way around since the foam would squish some as we upholstered it.  Then we put the quilt batting over it and stapled it down.  We trimmed the excess.  Finally, we upholstered it with the fabric, pulling, stapling, and trimming as we went.  The whole foam, batting, and upholstering process took about two hours with the two of us working, so I didn't think it was too bad.  It's important to note that, as you'll see in the pictures, we didn't take the foam, batting, and fabric all the way down the board.  We just took it down as far as the bed, and then the rest of the board goes down behind the bed onto the floor.  We stapled the batting and fabric underneath the bottom of the foam.

Robert mounted the headboard to our wall.  The main frustrating part about this is that our bed is between two windows, and it was really hard to find a stud.  Obviously, this might not be the case for you.  We're really please with how it turned out, and I would recommend this DIY project to anyone considering it.