The Dale C. Maley Family Web Site

Headboard for Stacy

Stacy requested that I design and build a headboard for her. She wants it painted flat black to match the other bedroom furniture she has. She gave me this photo as a suggestion:

Yes, that is cane in the upper panels.  I ordered some cane from Rockler. I have never messed with cane before, so this will be a new experience!

I designed up the new headboard in Google Sketchup. I had another old headboard that was 1.75" thick, so I decided to make this new headboard 2.0" thick.  Black does not show up well in Sketchup, so I made the headboard a light brown color to be able to see all the trim clearly.

I set up the old Sears 12 inch planer Model 3069142 to plane boards down to 2" thickness. I glued up 2x6's to 1x6's for starting thickness of 2-1/4".  Between passes thru the planer, I staged the boards in the bed of my truck......minimized amount of lifting.

 And here are the boards all planed and ready for final sawing to size: 

I used 3/8" dowels to glue up the frame. I used my old Sears 9-4184 center dowel set to mark the dowel holes for drilling:

Here is the main frame all glued and clamped....... 

The cane came rolled up. I soaked it for an hour in warm water in bathtub. Then I laid it flat so it would dry flat: 

I installed the mitered moldings in the panels. I painted the 2 lower panels black before I installed them. On previous projects, the panels moved and revealed unfinished areas. I painted these black first, so later movement while assembled would not show up:

I then nailed and glued the top piece on. I used my miter saw to miter the crown molding also. Clamping a block helped to keep the molding in the right position while sawing:

Again, I found the diagram invaluable for how to saw crown molding...........the same diagram shown above in the bathroom crown molding project.

I hund the frame upside down by 2 wires for painting in my shop using eyehooks in the bottom of the 2 legs:

I started to spray paint the frame with my one coat of flat black spray paint.......and boy was that a bad plan!  The raw pine sucked up the paint.  It would take a whole case of spray paint to paint the headboard!

I hand painted or brushed on 1 coat of black satin enamel...........later I can spray paint over it to change finish from gloss to flat black:

Closing Thoughts:

I would recommend making a bill of material and assigning each piece in the frame a part number.  You can then check off the part numbers one at a time as you saw each piece to length.

All-in-all, this project went pretty well. I was surprised how nice the flat black finish looked when I got done.