$35 DIY Headboard

As many of you know, we've never actually purchased a "real bed" - no joke, we slept on a futon for FAR too long after college. We only purchased a real mattress an embarrassingly short amount of time ago, but that futon frame is still here to stay. Needless to say, when you don't have a real bed, you don't have a real headboard, leaving a big empty space above our head for me to ponder nightly as I fall asleep. Yes, these are the things I think about. 

Artwork always felt weird there since it was just floating above our pillows with nothing to anchor it to our bed. The answer was so simple; using peel-and-stick wallpaper was super easy, super cheap, and removable (in case we change where the bed is in our room).

Just drew a line with a level, lined the top of the paper up with the line, and peeled off the backing. Smoothed it out with a little smoothing tool, and it's done!

Lining up the repeat was the trickiest thing, but it was pretty forgiving. Hence the "removable" part of peel-and-stick wallpaper, a couple of times I just peeled it back up and tried again. Once it was up in the shape I wanted, I cut some basic trim board to the right size for the sides and the top, and painted them white.

Lined them on the edges of the wallpaper, and nailed them in with finishing nails. 

If I were the type of person who cared, I would have gone over them with putty and another dab of paint, but turns out, I'm not that type of person. And from a distance, I'm totally happy with it! It makes me feel just a skosh more grown up not to have a blank wall behind my head at night - even if we're still sleeping on the futon frame from college.