When you look online do you see those beautiful bedframes and head boards that are just drool worthy? I know I do but I can only dream about them because we have someone in our family that doesn’t know how to take care of things….
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Let’s back track for a moment. Our bedframe has been with us for longer than your favorite pair of underwear…(don’t act like you don’t have one) and it was still doing what it was built for so we just never looked into a new frame. It is just a base frame so the sides of the box spring is exposed. All this time a bed skirt covered it until I grew tired of it so I took it off and left it showing until I figured out what I was going to do next. Then one day we started noticing one of our cats decided that she wanted to see if the box spring could handle her claws….(and she wasn’t feeling to bad about it either)
So I decided it was time to fix it. I came up with the idea to build a faux bed frame; I also had to accept that it wasn’t going to be made of fabric like a lot of the new frames are. We won’t harp on that let’s move on shall we…WOOOOSAHHHH……..ok I’m done.
ideas
When you are purchasing or building pieces for your space you need to keep in mind that they need to be functional not just pretty to look at. If you don’t want to spend a lot of money on a new frame or on your build a great idea is to make the wall at the head of your bed an accent wall or eye catching like we did with ours here.
Measuring
When building out your faux frame make sure when you measure the size of your bed you give a few inches otherwise it will be to small for your box spring. You also need to measure the height of your box spring. Different brands means sometimes different heights don’t assume that all box springs are built the same.
Building
Remember this is a faux frame. With that in mind I used three pieces of white oak for the main part and for the legs I used leftover wood from the laundry room wall that we did. Using wood glue and finishing nails I created the main base for three of the sides. I’m able to only use wood glue and finishing nails because it’s not going to be holding any weight of the actual bed. Our bedframe base has places where the headboard screws into it so I’m going to use those spots to attach the frame I’m building to it like this. Which will hold up the ends closest to the wall.
If your frame does need to actually hold up the bed then instead of finishing nails I would use L brackets like these. I would also seal it with wood glue first before adding the brackets as well. You will also need to have running boards under your box spring otherwise your frame isn’t going to be holding anything.
attaching the legs
When it came to the legs I wanted to add a unique look to it by creating them with dimension so it didn’t just look like four sticks of wood coming off of the bed. To get this look you will have to create a backing to the two pieces for it to hold them together. You could also use L shaped brackets here as well if you like and attach them with finishing nails or a heavy duty screws to the three main pieces. Depending on if yours is faux or actually carrying weight.
finishing touches
For the finished look I used a Minwax clear satin poly urethane which only gave it a clean look and didn’t change the color at all. I chose this to go with the style of our room but there are many different colors of stain you can choose from. If you would rather use fabric to finish your build these ideas here, here, and here may help with how you could do that.
At the end of the day I love our new frame and our cat now dislikes me just a little bit; but I do love how it finishes out our bedroom renovation. But if you know me than you know I could change my mind with the finish after a while that’s the joy of DIYing your own home.
If video is more your thing you can catch it all below.
