Just a quick post today about our barn door headboard project, with mostly pictures. We did a little bit of work over the weekend, after we got back from Michigan. Let’s take a look at where we were last at with the headboard. It had been cleaned, sanded, brushed off, sanded again. Then sanded again. And I think some more sanding.

The headboard has two issues, for our purposes. 1) It’s too tall/heavy, and 2) the bottom is in really bad shape. Luckily for us those problems can both be solved with one simple solution: cut the bottom off! In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have cut anything. The headboard would be tall enough to stand from floor to “proper headboard height” (that’s a carpenter term) and it would be light enough to be carried upstairs. But in reality, it’s just too heavy and the bottom is falling apart.

There is a natural division in the headboard, where a crossbeam is, so we decided to cut the bottom right below it. I’ll be building a stand/frame next weekend (after we get our new bed!) to get it to the right height. For this weekend, our main goal was to just trim off the bottom and keep the good part of the board. Which of course got me really excited to break out the circular saw.

Paying respects to the pagan god of the sun is always a good idea before playing with power tools.

Cutting the bottom off was really simple. Again, there was a natural place to cut, all I had to do was follow the line of the crossbeam.

A few places got us nervous. There were some sparks at one point. Not sure where those came from. I had to stop a few times because it just felt like the wood was really fighting back. But hey, we survived. But did we survive with all our fingers!? Yes. We did. Sorry for the tense moment there.

After the cutting was done, there wasn’t much else for us to do. Kerry sanded the bottom, where we made the cut. It didn’t need much sanding because the blade from the saw left the edge pretty smooth but I think I’ve created a sanding addict in Kerry.

And that’s it for this weekend. Our headboard is going to be much wider than it is tall. Wider than the bed. And because the of the frame I’m building, it’s going to appear to be floating. I’m not sure if that’s going to look good, but that’s what we’re doing!

If you want to see all the headboard posts, you can see them here.