I’m finally posting about that awesome DIY headboard that my husband built us for our master bedroom {which you can see the entire roomHERE} He built this headboard all by himself while I was out of state visiting a friend. I literally can take no credit for it, except for the staining of it.

Of course since I wasn’t there the only photos he took were on his cell phone of the process of building the headboard, but the photos were lost after his cell phone crashed. Conclusion: a picture tutorial was never mean to be for this project I guess 😉 He did such a good job & it literally is the star of our master bedroom makeover & I wanted to show you how he built it.

This DIY headboard was very simple to build for a few reasons. First of all don’t take it so serious, even my husband who is a perfectionist through that all out the window. We wanted the headboard to be rustic & have some lovely natural flaws. Secondly you can use any measurements you want. My husband literally chose random measurements and variations for the boards. There is no exact pattern to this, it’s all custom to how you want it to look.. don’t stress it. Here are the measurements we used for our king size headboard.

First of all we wanted the headboard to be longer than our actual bed so we measured a few extra inches on each side of the bed and came up with 83 1/2 inches total for our headboard. After we got the total measurement my husband randomly cut a few boards {we actually used fence boards from lowes with the fence points trimmed off the top} into different sizes. After having the random sizes, he deducted those numbers from the total headboard size to come up with the other board sizes needed. The fence post boards were all shorter than the total length of the headboard so there could not be a solid row on the headboard. You could use any wood you wanted, we wanted very rustic looking wood & that’s why we went with the fence post wood to replicate rustic palette wood.

Here is the headboard from floor to ceiling. As you can see he added cut outs  for
our outlets. O, and my handsome husband working away… such a great guy!

As far as attaching the boards to the wall: We decided since we were going all the way up the wall that we would attach the boards all to the wall. Our first plan was to attach two vertical boards on the wall & screw all the horizontal boards to the vertical boards. That plan went out the window when we started cutting the boards at shorter sizes & they all would not
reach the vertical boards we had picked out. So we got crazy with it and attached the boards to the wall with a drill making sure we used a level on each row before we secured them to the wall. The top board of the headboard is a piece of molding we had leftover from a previous project. If you were going to do a headboard like this, but not have it go all the way to the ceiling, you could easily attach vertical boards on the back to hold it all together, but for our ceiling high headboard we had to have it very sturdy and durable.

The stain color I used for this bed is Minwax Special Walnut. I loved how dark and rustic the stain was, but wasn’t too opaque to hide the natural variations in all of the boards used on this headboard. I ended up staining the boards after they
were on the wall, I wouldn’t recommend that, but we hadn’t decided on a finish until the very last minute of re-doing our bedroom…

So, there you have it! Our lovely little rustic headboard. I love that it doesn’t take up much space in our room, & yet is a major focal point of the space. What do you love about it?