We owe you a full recap of all things Haven/ATL, but we’re driving home today after a whirlwind trip — crashing great houses, taking a thrift-store tour with Katie B, and hosting an impromptu backyard wedding for Clara and Will — so for now we’ll share what we managed to finish before leaving for Atlanta: the start of a headboard for the newly rearranged master bedroom. With Ed the Bed officially minus posts, we turned our attention to giving him a fresh headboard, darker floors, and a darker dresser, as Sherry mocked up in Photoshop last week.
We wanted an upholstered headboard over a wood base — something cushy to lean against for bedtime reading. The new layout made the room cozier but a bit less soft, so an upholstered headboard felt like the right move.
Instead of our usual stretched-canvas technique, we needed a solution that worked around the remaining bits of Ed’s original headboard. Our plan used plywood and 1×3 boards to create a headboard that would wrap around the leftover posts and hide them from view. Picture the Photoshopped blue blocks below as wood.
Clara was a helpful assistant at Home Depot, mesmerized (and a little scared) by the big saw used to cut the plywood. We bought 5/8″ plywood cut to 65″ x 36″, but had them slice it down the middle so it would fit in our Altima trunk — and so Clara could help remind us to check out. The plywood plus two 1×3 whitewood boards came to about $22.
Back at home I laid out all the pieces to show how they’d be assembled. The two middle brace pieces compensated for the plywood being cut in half. The side pieces wrap around to hide the bedposts.
I attached the side pieces with a Kreg Jig and secured the brace pieces with a few spare screws driven in from the back.
Here’s the headboard assembled — this is the back side that will face the wall.
I thought we were ready to upholster, but Sherry wisely suggested bringing the headboard into the room first to confirm the fit. It fit width-wise, but the height felt a bit too tall and top-heavy for the bed’s modern, clean-lined profile. We wanted a lower rise to better compliment the proportions and leave room above the headboard to hang something and create a layered bedroom look.
After testing different heights by holding up paper across the room, we trimmed about 5″ off the top with a circular saw so we didn’t have to disassemble the whole thing and cut each piece separately on the table saw.
Back in place, the shortened headboard looks much more balanced with the bed’s low, modern lines. Anything taller would have felt too traditional and would have left less room to layer art and décor above it.
To clarify the wraparound detail: the 1×3 side pieces curl around the posts just enough to hide them. Once upholstered, that will create a seamless, thicker-looking headboard rather than one with visible posts behind it.
Sherry will cover the upholstery steps in a follow-up post — we shot a ton of photos to document the process — but here’s a preview of the fabric we chose. It’s a free-form botanical print that picks up the turquoise in the rug without competing with it through rigid geometry. Up close they look busy together, but the headboard sits on the wall while the rug sits on the floor, so they’ll coexist without clashing.
Clara thought the whole experience — surviving the “scary saw” and pushing the cart at Home Depot — was an adventure. For us, the main takeaway is Tip Numero Uno: always test the headboard’s height and fit in the room before you staple fabric and batting into place. Put the pillows on the bed when you check, since they affect how much of the headboard will actually show. What did you do this weekend? Any road trips with a toddler (or dog)? Any fellow headboard projects underway?