A Year In The Making...

About a year ago, I decided I wanted a real bed.  Like, a real grown up bed, with an actual headboard and storage space underneath. Except we couldn't afford a new bed. or rather I'm too cheap to spend $500 on a headboard.  So I settled on a new mattress... a sleep number...and while I was sleeping better, I was still completely unsatisfied by our college dorm style decor. The Sleep number also has virtually no space under the bed, so I got to thinking...

...and thought some more...

...and procrastinated...

...and then went to Lowes for a completely unrelated project when I found these...

...in the fence department.  They are the fancy, smachy, toppers for fence posts and sell for about $4 a piece.  I bought five (the odd one is for the center support), and spent... um... twenty bucks.  The brown things are the "feet" that come on every standard bed frame.

After my entire family thought I was crazy, and the husband thought I was stuck under the mattress for life, I emerged with all five "feet" and got to work attaching the two pieces together...

I found that pre-drilling the holes made it easier to get the screws into place. Feeling confident in my abilities, I then went to work hiking up all corners of the bed screaming for help and setting the feet back into place.

It was not long before I discovered that I would now need a ladder to get into bed or some of those old fashioned stairs from the 1600's. And that, quite simply, was not in the project specs.  So, I removed all the feet, cut them down about 3 inches, which made the finished height of the bed frame 22 inches from the floor and a lot less scary.

And let me tell you, you would not believe the storage I gained under there. Of course, now I needed a proper bed skirt since the old one was now 5 inches too short.

That took two months.  I had to find the fabric.  Then get around to it.  Then stop in the middle because I went through an entire spool of thread. So yeah... after a very unproductive few months, I ended up with a  nice, classic tailored bed skirt.

But that wasn't enough.  I needed a head board.  So I went right out and got plywood.  And it sat in the garage for two more months. One random Saturday, after the husband thought it was safe to relax, I dragged it all out and started cutting.  And gluing.  And there was a staple gun in there, lots of swearing, and some nailing of brass nail heads.  To produce this....

Which I was relatively happy with, considering anything close was $300 and up, and I was only in the hole about $35.

And yet, it still wasn't done... a few months later I found the bed spread to match....

... and I had just enough fabric left to make the valances....

I also found a giant X and an O wooden letters that have since filled the "holes" above the headboard (above and below the framed song lyrics) quite nicely.  Yip... it was all coming together... until I realized that lurking on the other side of the room was still 1992's dorm style hodgepodge of furniture.

Which got me thinking....

...for three months.

Now, all the wood is all in the garage.  We shall see what happens....