We recently redid my daughter's room, and switched her daybed with built-ins into a regular bed. So now she needs a headboard. I've seen upholstered pool noodle headboards done a few different times and it looked to good to be true. It can't be that easy and come out looking that great - can it?
Materials:
Pool Noodles
Backer Board
Fabric
Adhesive
Staple Gun
The first step is to have a backer board, which you can easily buy from any home improvement store. Okay, admittedly I I was trying to accomplish a few different things here, but we have so much scrap wood lying around that I really wanted to reuse it rather than throw it away - you can see my scrap wood art project here for reference. I also wanted a vey specific height, so I used a piece of cardboard cut to size and then hot glued the scrap wood pieces to it so I'd have the perfect size backer board.
Now on to the noodling! Calculate how many noodles you'll need depending on the size of the headboard. Measure and divide in half.
Once you mark the center of the noodle, slice it in half. I used a sharp kitchen knife and it worked perfectly.
The next step is to attach the half noodles to the backer board. I've seen this done with spray adhesive, and I did try that, but I found hot glue to work so much better. One point of caution - make sure your glue gun is set to low temp as to not melt the noodles.
After the noodles are attached, it's time to upholster it. I purchased some stretch grey velvet fabric, which I would NOT recommend. In order not to have any bunching, you need to pull one side tightly while attaching the other side. It just added an extra step and I had to learn from my mistakes as I went along. I also saw this step done with spray adhesive but I went back to old faithful - my hot glue gun. It adheres to fabric so well, it's become my go to for upholstering. I put a line of glue in between two noodles, put the fabric over it (while pulling one side tight) and used a ruler to push the fabric all the way down.
Once I was (finally) done with gluing the fabric, I flipped it over and used a staple gun to attach it to the back side.
Okay, this one actually came out better than I thought. It's so lightweight that attaching it to the wall was a breeze! I actually used Command velcro picture hanging strips. My daughter absolutely loves it, and at the end of the day, if your kids are happy, what else really matters?
