While we’ve already done a lot of work to the master bedroom, including replacing the carpet, painting, adding closet/storage space, and adding crown molding, when we took a step back and looked at the overall picture, it was looking a little blah in the color department. The walls and our coverlet were almost the same color, and the curtains behind the bed and the carpet were also pretty close to matching.
We wanted to give it a little more life, but repainting the room was not an option (we’d just paid to have it done less than 6 months ago, and I absolutely despise painting so was not going to do it myself). Plus we got a king size mattress (glorious!) given to us for free from a family friend, so it was the perfect excuse to change up the space a little. So off to Tar-jay, where we picked up a new coverlet, sheets, pillow, lamp shades, and curtains. Add to the decor some DIY pillows (made by hot gluing ric-rac in a crisscross pattern to some $4 Ikea pillows) and it was already looking better.
However, the empty space above the bed between the two lamps annoyed me every time I looked at it (we bought a simple metal bed frame with no headboard or footboard for our new mattress). It just needed something. Something cheap. I’ve seen many people DIY a headboard with fabric and a piece of MDF, but we thought that might make the wall too busy. Since you can never go wrong with adding architecture to a space, we decided to add some molding, in the shape of a headboard.
We picked up this stuff from our second home (aka Lowes) on Friday night (and yes, that’s what we call a fun Friday night. Don’t hate). Two pieces of 8′ long panel molding and a pair of decorative corners.
Before we did anything permanent, we used Paint.NET (poor man’s Photoshop) to sketch out the design on a photo of the room. After a few calculations (figuring out the center point and where we wanted the corner pieces to go), we cut the pieces to size and started nailing them up. The molding is made out of plastic, not wood, so you could probably use liquid nails or any other extreme bonding material to affix them to the wall, but we wanted the option of taking them off in the future without destroying the drywall, so we used the nail gun. And we soon found out that they are very easy to remove when we had to remove the first piece we put up because, it turns out, there is a right side up and down to them. If you weren’t matching the molding with corner or decorative pieces it wouldn’t matter, but the top and bottom are not symmetrical (if you look closely you can see one side has two small ridges, and the other has one large ridge). Also, a level is essential as well as a mitre saw, as we had to cut the corners on 45° angles so they would join evenly.
After Chris cut and nailed them up (and I documented the whole experience with the camera), I caulked the nail holes and joints. And in less than 30 minutes, we were done!
Here’s a photo timeline, ending with the final product.
We're Christoph & Lauren Gerz. We're children of the 80s. Our house was born in the 60s. Follow along as we give her a 21st century makeover!
