Trash to Treasure: Headboard Edition

Here is another project we did for our bedroom. We completed it some time ago but the BF is very proud of it and I wanted to post it for anyone who hasn't seen it.

So you guys remember this post about the dresser from the side of the road.

Exhibit A

Directly across from that is our bed, and henceforth our headboard. The inspiration came from one of my first pins ever. This pic:

here. You can find my whole bedroom inspiration board here.

So the BF was on the hunt for reclaimed wood. He brought home some pallets and those sat around for a while, and then Jeffry found these in a vacant lot:

And I think we heard angels. Just kidding. (Sort of.) We don't know if they were railroad ties or what. They were nailed together in groups of 2 so we thought that was kinda weird. And who knows how long they had been there but they were distressed and they were AWESOME. Not only was the wood old, but they had all sorts of dents and marks, and even big old nails in them. Reclaimed wood perfection. Each beam is 5' long (perfect for our queen bed) and they weigh a wopping 70 lbs. each. This is how we brought them home:

There's probably an 8-12" difference there easy!

 We let them sit in our backyard for a while, and then they got a good scrub down to remove any bugs and plants that had taken up residence. After that they got a few good coats of varnish to seal them

Then we had to decide how we wanted to put it together. The beams were so heavy that we didn't want to use any more than we needed to, so we cut a piece in half to use as a base. You can see that here:

This part is covered by our mattress anyway. We also had to figure out how to connect the beams together, since we didn't want a couple hundred pounds toppling over on our heads in the middle of the night! So what we did was we drilled a hole down through all the beams, and stuffed a 1" dowel down the hole. We used L brackets to connect the whole thing to the wall, and we also used heavy duty screws and metal plated on the back, like this:

Can't be too safe when there's hundreds of pounds looming over your melon!

I love how he sticks his tongue out when he's concentrating ;P

This is the pretty much finished product

Another bit of inspiration for the whole project was that Jeffry found some industrial looking lighting that was getting thrown out at his work, and he really wanted to add them to our headboard. They were originally hard wired, but I found some switched cords at IKEA that we used instead so we can switch them on and off from the bed, and they just plug into an outlet. We are both so happy with how it turned out!

With the overhead light on and off. Complete with Kitty photo bomb.

And sometimes he likes to do this:

He's about 3x that size now the little chunk