Making a Basic Upholstered Head Board

Budget:

• $12 for 1/4″ plywood

• $20 for fabric

• $27 for extra loft batting

Time:

• about 30 min for putting it together.
• probably an hour of shopping

there's quite a bit of ranting & rambling in this post.  be warned.

Our bed recently got upgraded from sitting on the floor to having pallets underneath.  Yep, pallets.  Why pallets, you ask?  Well, the basic metal bed frame squeaks & I always have a fear of falling through the middle.  So, I prefer to have my bed sitting on a solid foundation, i.e. the floor, or platform.  Since our bedroom is large but not quite big enough for a platform bed, we kept brainstorming.

I initially grabbed the first pallet when we went wine tasting. My grand vision was to make a headboard out of 2 pallets.  Wouldn’t that be really rustic and creative?  1 pallet grew to 2 (thanks to a willing and helpful bf).  Unfortunately, the 2 did not match!!! oh darn!  1 pallet was just too narrow standing behind the bed by itself.

After more pallet hunting & brainstorming later, I decided to make a upholstered headboard instead.

Trekking out to Colma from SF (I know, such a LONG 8 mile drive!), I was happily browsing away in Jo-Ann.  I had decided that I needed 72″ of fabric.  Not bad.  However, I somehow thought the prices I saw was per foot, instead of per yard (yes, quite silly, but that just showed how inexperienced I am at buying fabric… and also made me miss being in a metric-based country, where calculation was simply moving the decimal point!).

Anyhoo…, foam also turned out to be quite expensive (well, expensive in the sense that I was still in my false yardage calculation state of mind).  I took the advice of a store staff to go with the extra-loft/thick batting and get the thickness by using a super large sheet and fold it a few times.

Finally I got all my components home. 

The assembly process was surprisingly quick.

Step 1: wipe down the plywood.  It was pre-cut at Home Depot when I bought it.  They will do the first 2 cuts for free if you need it.

Step 2: iron the fabric.  ahhh, pretty coral pattern.  I think it’s not too girl-y.

Step 3: fold the batting as many times as I could to cover the board & staple it.  I did this process quicker than I expected and had too much fun to take pictures.

Step 4: staple the fabric all over it.  Try to make the fabric as smooth as I could.  Ta-da!  I got a headboard.

Reupholster Basic Chair

Budget:

• $0 for chair (already had)

• $0 for paint (left-over)

• $3 fabric from garage sale
  

• $9 staple gun

Time:

• 2 hours

This chair has been in my bf’s family for many years.  In fact, he recalled the time the chair was last reupholstered when his older sister owned it in college.  Well, that was 10+ years ago.  As you can see, the fabric is torn as some place, and the print on the fabric, well, is not exactly what I see working for our new place.  (For anyone that knows me, you can see that ‘French country’ isn’t quite my style).

I’ve been wanting to practice upholstering for a while, and this is a great starting point.  I’ve watched tutorial videos online.  This seems like a very straight forward project.  Slowly, I purchased my first staple gun. *yay!*  and found a large amount of fabric I like at a garage sale.

Step 1: remove the cushion from the chair.  It was held together by 3 long screws.

Step 2: sand the chair with sand paper/block & wipe down with damp towel.

Step 3: Paint the wood chair frame itself with black paint.  Unfortunately, this was ‘rust resistant’ paint with LOTS of odor.  yuck.  Beggers can’t be choosers, I suppose.

Step 4: Remove the fabric from cushion.  There were many staples on it that was quite time consuming to rip the fabric off of. 

Step 5: cut the new fabric to a shape bigger than the cushion.  Line up the cushion on top of fabric.

Step 6: start stapling the fabric onto the cushion.  The corners are a little tricky.  It took me some arranging & rearranging to grab the fabric in the way that it had the least amount of folds. 

Step 7: put the finished cushion back on the painted chair [when the chair has dried completely].  Screw the long screws back in.  and Viola!