Barnwood Headboard

We finally decided to make a headboard for our master bedroom.  Pinterest gave me a lot of ideas; making faux barn-wood, or barn door style bedroom pieces, using pallets or pine.  We opted to get real barn-wood.  Hand cut, and aged to silver perfection!  I got one beam, and three strips of siding.  You can find barn-wood for sale on places like Craig's List, but the prices are on the high side.  Some of the local places that you can buy reclaimed lumber from don't usually sell to the public in the small quantities that we needed.  Luckly for us I found a place down in Merriam, KS,  Beaver Timber, reasonable prices, a great selection, and I even got to hand feed a baby lamb while we were there!  Which really made my day!!!

Once we got the timbers home we had to store them in the basement while we finished some other projects to get the garage cleared out.  The first thing that needed to be done was cutting the large beam in half to make the two posts.  Careful measurements, and a really long straight edge made that process fairly easy.

Then it was time to measure three or four times to determine how tall the posts were going to be before cutting them to length.  One was a bit thicker than the other and I got to help by hand sawing the last little bit.

We aren't going to throw the end pieces away, we have thought about turning the smaller chunks into lamp bases, or something else cool.

We have a rough drawing on how we want the piece to look, but with barn-wood you just have to see how it wants to go together.

There are a lot of character spots in these pieces of wood. And we are taking advantage of as many of them as we can!

The ends of the boards needed to be routed so they would fit flush into the posts.

Then the posts needed a channel dug out for the boards to slide into.

We used large clamps to get everything in place and square.

Once they were all in place we used screws to hold everything together.  We wanted to use wooden pegs, but the screws were easier.

Now that it is all together it is time to clean and seal the whole thing before carrying it up to our room and attaching it to the bed frame.

Our neighbors helped carry this huge project upstairs, and attaching it to the frame took a few steps, but was fairly easy to do.

After cleaning up and re-making the bed...it's all set up and ready to go!