FJELLSE Headboard

Materials: FJELLSE full bed, stain, piece of pine, L brackets, drill, screws, screwdriver

Description: I needed a bed, was on a budget and hated everything on Craigslist. For under $100 I got a bed a like that I think looks great.

The FJELLSE full bed was on sale for only $49. I picked it up and skipped the $20 slats and got a free box spring from Craigslist.

The headboard with the bed is ugly in my opinion and so I wanted to cover it up. I saw some hacks for this style of bed, but most of them were padded headboards. I wanted something rustic. Originally I was going to purchase several planks of wood and stack them on top of each other. I found a 2'x 8'x1/4" piece of wood at Home Depot and had them cut it down from 8' to a couple inches under 6' which would be the length of the bed. This piece was $27.99 and listed as "shelving" on my receipt, though it was just in the general lumber area.

We also purchased to packages of L brackets to use to affix the headboard to the bed. You can see how we did in the photo. My dad was also concerned about it holding and adding a screw on each side through the posts of the bed.

In terms of assembly, we assembled the bed like the instructions, only adding the piece of wood to the bed at the beginning after we assembled the headboard. We had measured the box spring and mattress to know how much higher on the headboard to place the lumber too (about 12" with a standard 9" box spring).

The unfinished pine also screams IKEA so that also needed fixing (note: I originally tried using a spray on stain. Horrible. Wound up using old stain we already had that had a finish to it. Would have saved about $20 had this goof-up not occurred!). This was also done days before we assembled as it took awhile to dry with the rain. We also didn't bother staining the parts that wouldn't show, like the midbeam.

I feel like the end product doesn't look IKEA at all!

~ Sharon, Long Beach, CA