Making Headboards

While I enjoy traveling, I've been spending some of my spare time on household projects. One project has been building headboards for two guest rooms.

(c) 2014, R. Ono

On the right is my first effort which used a faux suede fabric. The lack of a design on the fabric made
the project fairly easy. The headboard is free standing. It is hung on the wall via a French cleat picture hanger. The cleat is anchored to a wall stud for further strength.

This project is fairly easy. It requires half inch interior plywood (grade B or C), a foam pad, batting material, adhesive spray glue, heavy duty thread to mount the buttons and a 7/8 inch fabric covered button kit. The only tools required are a tape measure, electric drill, heavy duty stapler and a level for mounting. To reduce the cost of the foam, I used a foam mattress topper, with the egg crate portion glued against the plywood.  The most time consuming task is aligning the buttons so that they are vertically and horizontally straight. 

(c) 2014, R. Ono

My second headboard project was again a full size headboard but the fabric had a more pronounced design. The fabric required a bit more attention to ensure the design remained straight. We had some left over fabric for my wife to make a couple of pillow bolsters. This headboard is shown at the left unmounted. The eight fabric covered buttons are visually subtle as I used the background color for them 

The headboards are very comfortable for reading in bed. Previously, the guest bedroom in the first picture had a brass headboard. The brass headboard looked nice, but wasn't very practical. The 'brass pipes' on the headboard made it necessary to use a bunch of pillows for bed-time reading.