Headboard

(Norsk)
A little over a year after the redecorating of our bedroom, my better half and I have finally made a headboard for our bed. Originally planned made right after the bedroom was finished, the usually stuff cropped up that needed doing first and time slipped away. Since the headboard was planned we had bought an extra length of curtain, so that we could upholster the headboard in the same fabric. My father also had a chipboard spare after they expanded their kitchen this summer, so he donated that. In addition we needed 11 buttons and a foam mattress.

The chipboard was sawn and drilled according to the drawing beneath. The bed is 180 cm wide, that became the width of the headboard too. By using height equal to halv the width, it became very easy to make the hole pattern. The holes were originally just Ø 8 mm, but it proved too difficult to hit such a tiny hole with a needle after first pushing it through 9 cm of foam mattress. So the holes were widened to Ø 22 mm (they could easy be a different size, but a 22 mm drill bit was incidentally the first one I found amongst my tools). I have not bothered with tolerances in this drawing. The chipboard was sawn with a hand circular saw, by pencil lines I had made using a yardstick and a straightedge, and the center marks for the holes were made in the same way.

In the picture beneath the chipboard is up against the wall, before all the holes were expanded to Ø 22 mm. In the picture, only the holes in the two upper corners are that big. These two holes are meant to hang the headboard onto the wall with two woodscrews. A small tip here will be to place the chipboard onto the appropriate place on the wall and mount the two woodscrews before assembling the headboard further. Then when the headboard is done, it can be placed on the wall quickly and easily.

In hindsight, it might have been better to let the chipboard be 170x80 cm by shrinking it 5 cm on both sides and the top and bottom. Then the foam mattress would protrude 5 cm outside the chipboard i every direction, which would probably have let the edges look even nicer than they do in the end result here. However it would then be necessary to have som spray glue handy, in order to glue the plate to the foam mattress. The glue was not necessary for us here, it was enough with the 11 buttons.

The curtain was placed on the floor on some protective covering (that is to say two exercise mats...)

The foam mattress, a standard 90 x 200 x 9 cm, was cut from 200 cm to 180 cm length. Then it and the chipboard were placed on top of the curtain. The curtain was folded over the edges and stapled to the chipboard. Do not save on staples here. When I worked as a furniture salesman for Bohus Jæren I got to help our warranty guy in re-upholstering a few different furnitures and experienced first-hand that placed the staples close to each other is quite positive.

Then we flipped the headboard up. While standing behind it I showed a knitting needle through a hole and the foam mattress so that it poked at the curtain fabric. My better half was ready on the other side with a button, a strong needle and quadruple thread (we used thread for button holes, since it is supposed to be really strong). By quadruple I mean that a double thread was threaded through the button, then both ends of the thread was threaded through the needle in order to avoid having knot (and weak point) on the button. The needle was pushed though the fabric where the knitting needle was, then both needle and thread was pushed through the foam mattres and out through the hole, where I pulled the needle through and held onto the thread. Then I pulled on the thread while my better half pushed the button into the headboard, and again I used the staple gun, stapling the thread to the chipboard in a back-and-forth pattern.

As I was stapling the tenth button, the thread on the ninth button snapped, shooting the button away from the headboard. Button number nine and eleven therefore got a double quadruple thread (that is to say that a quadruple thread was threaded through the button, making it double quadruple through the needle and the headboard) just in case. This will also be the method of repair should the threads on any of the other buttons snap (hopefully not in the middle of the night...).

The finished headboard was hung on the wall above the bed. The plan was to place a double spotlight in the middle, right above the headboard with the cord hidden behind the headboard, but the dimmer buttons ended up too far away to reach without sitting up in bed. Instead we put up two single spotlights, one above each nightstand.