DIY Homemade Headboard

By Matt Weber

There are hundreds of ways to make a headboard. Here’s one—a custom creation combining style and function.

On some of my home projects, I’m just winging it. Case in point: making a headboard for a bed. According to my wife, a headboard is a crucial decorative element for a bedroom. It was absolutely imperative that we got one. I had never given the matter of headboards much thought, but I’ve since learned that it’s a hot topic for interior designers, with some specialty outlets offering a product line of nothing but headboards in a wide range of materials, sizes and prices.

Most of the headboards I found online range from about $120 to $400, and even higher. You can find headboards made from metal, wood, leather, wood and more. Some styles are strictly decorative, and some are functional with storage shelves.

My wife, Shanna, wanted the headboard colors to harmonize with the bedroom’s chocolate walls and turquoise window and bed dressings. The right tones would provide a splash of color to offset the otherwise dark scheme of the room, but Shanna also wanted the headboard to be upholstered to provide a soft, comfortable headrest for nighttime reading. This combination of features proved difficult to find, so we decided to invent our own.

Plywood Frame

Building this style of headboard is a fairly straightforward project and well within the skill set of the average DIY’er. The backbone of the project is a sheet of 3/4-inch sheathing-grade plywood. We decided that a height of about 22 inches above the surface of the mattress provided adequate room for a headrest. I decided to give it an additional 18 inches of height that extended below the bed surface (behind the mattress and box-spring), so the headrest would look like an integrated component of the bed when viewed from the side. This gave me a full frame height of roughly 40 inches. I made the width of the plywood frame 80 inches—a few inches wider than the width of the king-size mattress. I cross-cut and ripped the plywood to size on a couple of sawhorses, using a circular saw and a straight-edge guide.

Use a circular saw to cut the rough dimensions of the plywood frame.