Furniture & Interior

DIY bed with upholstered headboard

Bedroom makeover including the DIY bed with custom geometrical patterned headbord and an IKEA hack for the classic six drawers MALM dresser.

  • Date

    Jan 19, 2021

  • Difficulty

    Difficult

  • Category

    Furniture & Interior

01. Intro

We had been looking for a suitable bed for some time, but none of the beds we found online met all the criteria that were important to us. Since we only have limited storage space, we needed drawers under the bed to store all our things. Finding one that was affordable and had a good design was simply impossible. So i designed my own bed and brought it to life. To be completely honest, the project was not that easy to complete, but in the end it was more than worth it for us and our needs.

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02. How to – Bed

Our bed is 1,8m x 2m large and in order to complete this project we needed roughly 1400 staples, the wooden base and 10m of 1,5m wide upholstery fabric. Furthermore, we used 5cm thick foam for the headboard and 3cm thick foam for all other parts. We wrapped all pieces in additional 3cm thick quilting cotton.

Preparing the bed base

For the substructure we chose 18mm thick blockboard and 37mm x 57mm and 57mm x 77mm battens. Download the instructions with all the dimensions further down in the article for more information. we strengthened the corners with brackets and screwed the beams together. We put a little padding between the wooden beams to prevent the bed frame from squeaking.

Upholstering the headboard

To have a straight line for aligning the foam parts while building the headboard, we stapled 1cm wide strips of cardboard along the marked parts.
For the upholstery of the headboard, we used 5 cm thick foam. on top of that, we added a 3 cm layer of upholstery batting. finally, we put the fabric around each upholstery, folded it over at all edges and fastened it with staples at 3 cm intervals, starting from the centre. We have made sure that we do not have to staple more than two large edges to existing cushions on any part. For the first edge, we turned the fabric inside out and fastened it along the edge. For all the others, we laid the cushions down and put the fabric over them. then we marked where we had to staple.Then we took the cushion out again and stapled along the marking. after each part we cut off the excess fabric.

Upholstering all other parts

Similar to the headboard, we also covered the footboard and the drawer fronts and fixed them with screws.

03. Time Lapse

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04. Downloads

Here you will find the shopping list and assembly instructions for the bed frame and the fabric cuts for the upholstery of the headboard.

Download shopping list
Download assembly instructions
Download fabric guide

05. The finished project

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06. How to – IKEA MALM dresser hack

We have the six drawer wide MALM dresser from IEKA. We wanted to have a more custom-made furniture look therefore we decided to paint the whole dresser and add wall moulding.

Attach the edging

To give the chest of drawers a unique touch, we attached two different types of styrofoam wall mouldings. We then glued them to the drawer fronts with wood glue.

Paint the dresser

To give the chest of drawers a complete exterior, we have painted all sides and drawer fronts with chalk varnish. To seal the surface, we finished the surface with clear lacquer.

Add legs

To complete the project, we decided to attach feet to the chest of drawers. To do this, we screwed a leftover piece of a bed beam to the bottom to create a support surface for the feet. In total, we attached 8 feet for a better stand.

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