Wood block Headboard DIY

Hey there <insert wave aka Forest Gump style>,

I promised a quick and easy DIY on the guest bedroom headboard last week so today I’m finally getting around to sharing it. If you’ve followed along with my guest room refresh I did for the ONE ROOM CHALLENGE you know I rode the struggle bus trying to find a head board that would be inexpensive yet look good with the wallpaper we added to the space. This is what I came up with.

I had seen this before on Pinterest (I cannot locate the owner of this pic so if you know who’s it is please let me know). I loved it as an art piece with all the texture and warmth of the wood and knew it would make a perfect headboard.

What we used to make the headboard:

Plywood cut to size- 76 x 34 for a queen size bed with 7 inches on either side (so I can add lighting)

3 - 4 x 4 posts

3 - quarts Varathane Wood Stain in Iron Navy, Sunbleached and Grey

Wood Screws

Wood Glue

That’s it!

To begin we used the saw to cut the posts into three sizes. 1/2 inch, 1 inch and 1.5 inch pieces. Stacking them by size as we went.

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Next we (totally meaning my husband) used a sander to smooth the blocks. We used an electric sander to make quick work of them. I then took a sand paper block to finish smoothing them.

Now it was time for the fun part! I stained all the blocks. I chose Varathane wood stain because It dries fast and covers easily. The colors are Navy, Grey and Walnut. It took two coats to get the coverage I was looking for. We stained three sides because of the different depths.

Next we cut a piece of plywood the size we wanted for our queen size bed. We went with 64 inches wide and 30 inches tall. So we had had our base. We then attached (using wood screws) two 1 x 2 posts cut to the height we needed to the plywood.

Finally we started to glue the wood blocks to the plywood in a random pattern. A quick tip here. Push the blocks firmly in place so that the glue has solid contact with blocks and the plywood. Stand back every couple of rows to make sure you are keeping the colors and heights mixed. We placed books on the glued blocks overnight to let the glue set. We painted the edges of the plywood a light brown.

So every DIY I do there is usually that moment when you think…how could I miss that?!?!?! Ours was when we realized we could have made this much easier on ourselves if we had made the math work and the blocks would have filled the plywood divisible by four. But nope, not how we roll. So we had to trim one block on every row to make it fit. Sigh.

Finished headboard!