DIY: Found Headboard

Last spring my parents purchased a house here in town to renovate and turn into a rental. The previous owners of this property were an older couple who had lived there for quite a few years and managed in that time to accumulate a mass of junk. There were multiple storage buildings in the backyard filled with all kinds of dust ridden treasures from the 1950’s and a house full of items that they must have decided weren’t worth taking with them but were too lazy to throw out themselves. Among the items left in the house was this:

A solid wood matching headboard and foot board, missing the side rails.

Katie and I immediately noticed this bed on our first visit to this property and really like the shape and finish. Our current guest bed had been an iron headboard Katie had used in college, painted over multiple times, and attached to your standard metal bed frame. We didn’t have time to do anything with it at the moment but decided that it might make a neat guest bed in our house someday so we took it and placed it in our garage in inventory, where it stayed for several months.


This past weekend we decided to pull the bed out and see what we could do with it. We knew we needed to add side rails and somehow refinish the entire bed to make the new side rails match but honestly neither one of us had any knowledge of how to go about it. We spent some time looking at our bed to understand how the side rails worked and took some measurements and decided that a 2X6 would probably be a good height and thickness for the two side rails that we needed to make. We also needed some way to attach the side rails to the headboard and foot board. So we headed over to the Home Depot, because it was lunch time, and picked up a 12’ 2X6, and a handful of brackets to attach the side rails to the bed.

We added a block under each side rail nailed to the bed to help support the weight so it is not all being held by the bracket and also to help line everything up.

We also needed some smaller brackets to attach the ledge on the inside of the rails that the slats would sit on. After the railed were attached, we ripped a 2X4 through the table saw in half and flipped the bed on its side to attach our ledge.We had some 3/4 hardwood left over from various projects so we cut a few slats about 3" wide, measured the inside of the bed from rail to rail and cut them to length.


We also decided to go ahead and add a few center supports under the middle rails to help hold the weight of the bed. We had a few feet of the side ledges left over from the 2x4 we ripped in half so that worked perfect.

Now that our bed frame was complete we dragged the box springs and mattress out to the garage just to make sure our measurements were correct and it all fit before proceeding. I thought a bed in the garage would be perfect for guests, or even for taking a short nap during projects, however the misses strongly disagreed.

Once the mattress was safely back in the house, we decided to do an antique finish by staining the entire bed and then painting it and sanding off a portion of the paint so the stain would show through. Since the headboard and foot board were already pretty rough looking and the side rails were brand new wood, we thought this would help unify the look.

We didn't have enough of a single stain on the shelf to do the entire bed so we mixed a few together, probably from containers that had been mixed before honestly. It ended up being a light brown but served our purpose well.

After the stain was dry we painted the bed white. We used a Behr ceiling white in a satin that was already on our shelf. We decided on white since we knew the nightstands in our guest room were black and the dresser that will eventually go in there is white as well.


As soon as the paint had dried we got to work sanding. We took some fine grit sandpaper and we over the entire bed, especially the edges and corners so some of the stain underneath would show through.

Finally got Katie in a picture. She was glad when we were finished with this project so she could park in the garage again.

When we finally finished, around 10:30 at night I believe, and the end result looked great. Better than I imagined halfway through the project when I had some serious doubts if the whole thing was going to work.
We quickly took the bed apart and set it up again in it's new home in our guest room. We were relieved the white bed works so well against the grey/blue walls (granite builder, Behr) which was the first thing we painted in our house over a year ago.

Along with building beds, lately all we seem to be working on in our house is lighting. Our plan is to replace every fixture/fan in the entire house before everything is said and done (we are about halfway there) so our next post is going to be about our most recent, and most exciting, lighting purchases.