As I’m nearing the end of the walk-in closet project (which I hope to have finished by the end of this month), I’m starting to think more about our bedroom, which I’ll be tackling next. If you’re new around here, this is what our bedroom look like right now…
This room used to be our home gym, which is why it has colorful striped walls. But it will soon be our bedroom.
To turn this into a cozy, warm, welcoming bedroom, the goal will be something like this, with teal grasscloth walls, teal velvet curtains, an upholstered headboard in this exact fabric, this multi-colored rug with orange as the dominant color, etc.
To do that mockup, I used this headboard from Ballard Designs. In the mockup, I showed it without the nailhead trim, but since I love nailhead trim on just about everything I can put it on, I would prefer it to look like this…
But I’m not necessarily sold on that particular shape. I could also do something like this one, with a more subtle curved design.
But this weekend, I took some time to look at upholstered bed options to finalize my plan for our bedroom. I’ll be making the headboard myself, and I’d like to have the plan in place by the time I get to that project so that I don’t have any delays once I’m ready to begin. And that’s when I came across this bed. I sat and stared at this bed for quite a bit of time, studying all of the details and wondering if this is something I could actually make myself. If it had squared corners, I’d have no doubt that I could make it myself. But I’m not so sure about those curved areas on the headboard and footboard. And of course, it’s the curves and the finials that make it so special.
So that got me to thinking that maybe instead of doing a fully upholstered headboard, I might prefer to do something with a wood frame around the upholstered area. It could include an upholstered section on the footboard as well, like the one above or the one below…
Or I could just keep the upholstery to the headboard and make the rest of the bed wood like this one…
Of course, the easiest option would be to keep everything square, like this one…
I know for a fact that I could make that one fairly easily because I’ve already done it before. That’s very similar to the one I made for our original bedroom in this house. It’s the same headboard that I ended up using in the guest bedroom.
All of the examples I found of beds with upholstered headboards and footboards have solid colored fabric. And since I’m using a patterned fabric, I’m not quite sure how that would look on a footboard. So perhaps I should just keep the fabric to the headboard and make the rest of the bed wood. You can tell me your thoughts on that.
If I do a wood frame, that takes care of a big challenge that I’d run into with a fully-upholstered headboard that I haven’t been able to figure out. The fabric I bought is only 56 inches wide, and a I need a queen size headboard. The fabric has a very definite “up” and “down” pattern, and a queen size headboard is at least 60 inches wide, but probably more like 64 inches if it’s attached to side rails. And since the fabric can’t be railroaded because of the pattern, that means that a fully upholstered headboard will require seams to match the pattern to make it wide enough to span the width of the headboard.
I can’t figure out how Ballard Designs gets around that problem. Do their queen- and king-sized headboards have those seams, but they just don’t show them on the pictures? I’m not sure how I feel about having the fabric seamed on a fully-upholstered headboard. But if I were to do a wood frame, I could get away with not having to seam the 56-inch-wide fabric plus the width of the wood frame would be wide enough (I think).
I have no idea if that makes sense. To be honest, I’m exhausted from sanding the floors, and my brain feels quite fuzzy this morning. But if you’ve ever made a queen- or king-sized upholstered headboard using patterned fabric that couldn’t be railroaded, let me know how you did it. Did you add seams in the fabric? How did the finished headboard look? Did the seams disappear and blend in? Or were they visible?
And if you’ve ever made a wood frame upholstered headboard with curved corners, what tips do you have? After seeing that first bed, I kind of have my heart set on it now, but those curved corners baffle me.
Anyway, I hope to have an update on the floors for y’all tomorrow. I finished the sanding at 11:00pm on Friday night and then ended up having to take the weekend off because I injured myself after doing something really stupid. Ugh. I’m not quite back to 100% this morning, but I feel so much better, so I can get back to the floors today and hopefully finish them up.
Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 fixer upper that my husband, Matt, and I bought in 2013. Matt has M.S. and is unable to do physical work, so I do the majority of the work on the house by myself. You can learn more about me here.
