Pegboard Headboard

These are some of my dream beds:

OK, this is a bit extravagant, but I like tufted headboards.

Sleigh beds are also cool. I saw a couple that paired the sleigh bed with a tufted headboard.

We will probably not have a four-poster but they make me think of Harry Potter and England, so I am kind of drawn to them. A canopy is of course a requirement. They seem magical, like if I had one I'd feel like a princess ... who knows, may I will get one someday. A four-poster with a tufted headboard and sleigh bed footer! No, that would be too much.

But none of those are in the budget (or would fit in our bedroom) right now. We have a nice new mattress, the second large item we bought together for "our house" (the first being the papasan Matt got me for my birthday/for our home), but for a long time we didn't have a headboard. We took a while deciding what we wanted and thought about making one ourselves or going without. It didn't look too bad without:

But then I saw some neat ideas on Pinterest, like this one:

I was a little unsure if the pegboard would turn out looking tacky, but I decided that if it did I could just scrap it and use the pegboard in the garage. Also, I saw that someone had made a tufted headboard with pegboard and foam and decided that could possibly be our upgrade in the future.

Steps to Make Your Own Pegboard Headboard (well, the steps I took anyway):

1. Measure. The length of our bed was about ... 5" 3' or so. It's a queen. I decided that 5"6' might nicely hang out over each side just enough. I estimated that 4" tall from the ground would look good.

2. Check the prices and sizes of pegboard at Lowe's [or whatever hardware store you frequent]. They had a type that was pre-painted white on one side. 8" by 4" for $18. I decided I wanted the white because at first I thought then I wouldn't have to paint it. Luckily I wanted the the board to be 4" x 5"6'. If I'd wanted it taller than 4" I would've needed to buy two pieces.

3. Also buy trim if you want that. I think it made our headboard look more polished. That was about $7 for the two 10" lengths I bought. I got a style that was pretty plain, just a slight swoop sort of, with a very tiny lip on the back to hang over the edge of the pegboard. Have them cut your pegboard at the store to the right height or length if you don't have the tools for that at home (which I didn't ... I could have borrowed a jigsaw from dad, but it wouldn't have been as straight of a cut if I did it myself rather than using Lowe's cutting machine.)

4. Go home and make a mess trying to clean off the dust and cardboard-like paper particles that obstruct some of the holes of the pegboard. That part was not well thought out. The edges and back are not painted, and I tried to brush off a lot of the little paper bits so they didn't show through the holes ... I got many off (all over our floor) but I wouldn't spend hours of your life doing this because I decided that once it was up against the wall, they'd be too shadowed to tell anyway.

5. Paint the pegboard even though you thought it would be fine without. As I said, the edges were brown and scruffy. Even though I knew I wanted to cover those, I decided one quick coat of some leftover trim paint from our bedroom might help it not scuff badly and then I could make it match the trim easily. Plus, if you don't want that bright white, you'll have to paint it either way. It looked like at Lowe's they also had all brown small pieces (which you'd need multiples) but possibly big pieces too that were cheaper since they were not painted. That might be a better choice, especially if you are painting it something dark anyway. But the coating did make it possible for me to do just one coat of paint and it looked pretty good.

6. You could deviate here, but here's how I did the next steps. Put the pegboard behind the bed. Measure and cut the trim at 45 degree angles where the corners will match up. Paint the trim.

 

7. Since I was lazy and wanted to get it up as fast as possible, here's how I attached the trim: Put on the left side trim and get it lined up. Have a partner/helper/husband/wife hold the top side trim aligned on the top. Pre-drill through the top trim (see where my nail is?) and then tap the nail through that and into the side trim to hold. Do this to the other side too. Then, lean parts of the trim away from the pegboard a little at a time and dot with some gorilla glue. I did about two  or three places along each side. Clamp until it dries.*

*Preferably, have more than one clamp so this doesn't take you several days (like me). Also, don't accidentally stick your clamp RIGHT OVER the spot where you put the glue, causing one of the clamp ends to get stuck and pull off when the glue expands (also me). My clamp still worked, but I'll have to get that piece off there somehow. 

8. At this point, after removing the clamps and adjusting, you should be about done! A unique headboard for about $25 dollars. I saw a couple pictures where they'd hung the headboard above the bed on the wall, giving it more space so that you could actually use the pegs to hang baskets for holding books or lights. I didn't want to attach ours to the wall, so we just set it behind the bed, but I think it looks kind of neat. It is nice having the pillows rest on and be framed by that rather than just resting against the wall.

Don't mind the blurred and black-edged look in those pictures. I was trying out functions on my new camera that I got for Christmas. I don't really have too much need for those but it's fun to use the features.

Calibre

A few months ago Matt introduced me to calibre, an awesome Free and Open Source Software e-book management/library cataloguing system. We had plans to start adding all the books we own to calibre for reference and fun. Not only does it record the basic important information (title, author, publication stuff, etc.), but you can also download covers and create your own columns for recording information. More on that later though.

I was a little impatient before we got started and decided one day to just get a rough count of the books in our house. As I tallied the books, I did a very, very general sorting of them by genre using my first impressions. Really sorting the books by genre would take forever and there would be overlaps. To the left is what I came up with at the time.

I had estimated we had about 590 to 600 books, knowing that I'd left out some in the living room and our cookbooks, and may have forgotten one or two others. I was pretty proud to have that many books, though, and to know that I'd read a significant portion of them.


Just before Christmas Matt and I finally set about putting all the books into calibre using the ISBN numbers. calibre is great (especially because it is free) and I would recommend any of you with personal libraries of your own to check it out -- it does have some annoyances though. Sometimes there was a little trouble putting in the ISBN numbers (and also, though this is not calibre's fault, ISBN numbers were not used until the early 70's, so earlier than that books will not have them and you will have to the enter the information manually to an empty template ... not too bad unless you have about 50 old/vintage books that you used for wedding decorations ... like me).

The other thing that sometimes made me grumble was how calibre gathered information for the books. Usually, it seemed to get the info from Google using the ISBN (although later we added isbndb.com as a source and I think that helped some). The info was not always correct or consistent. For example, when I put in the Harry Potter series, some of them were formatted as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone while others were formatted as The Prisoner of Azkaban: Harry Potter Book 4. So that was a little annoying to fix but not bad. When I would click on the ISBN link though, it would link to http://www.worldcat.org/. WorldCat is neat, and sometimes the information there was correct - so I'm not sure why calibre didn't borrow it from there. Other times WorldCat was also incorrect or the titles were screwy .... so getting the books in was sometimes a bit tedious is what I am getting at.

However, I don't want that to discourage you from using calibre if you want some free library software, because in the end, having all our books listed in one place is super awesome. I like that I can easily see what books I own and have yet to read (a lot more than I thought). I made a column for me and one for Matt that I can check "read" or "not read" or leave blank if it is something like a dictionary that no one really "reads." I can also see that I was WAY off when I estimated the count the first time.

At the final count of all the books in our house (before bringing over about 20 more from Matt's house after the official count) we had a total of 741 books. Let me say that with text, too, so you can feel the magnitude: SEVEN HUNDRED AND FORTY-ONE BOOKS!!!

Whoa. How do those all fit in our small house? Well, I plan to write some future posts about how to fit a 1000-book library in your house along with you, your spouse, and a cat. Ok, so we aren't at 1000 yet, but we are up to 767 after bringing some from Matt's house, and he's still got more there. I don't have spaces for them yet, but we'll see ...

Here's some more library art. You can see I've read a significant portion of our "readable" (read: not dictionaries and cookbooks) books, but still have a long way to go to fill out the gray area. Matt and I have both read 46 of the books we own.