Aluminum Flashing Headboard ~ DIY

Hello friends!  Hope your weekend was grrrrrreat!  I finally found time to slap together a few more posts.  So, staying on my Aluminum Flashing bandwagon.  Here is another easy DIY project.  Easy on the pocket book too.   A headboard this time!

I suppose this is also a sneak peek of a bedroom I'm in the process of doing (almost done!).  This bedroom is a guy's (college age) room, so I got to go more masculine than some of my other bedroom makeovers.  I'll have lots of pictures of that in full, soon.

So back to the headboard.  Aluminum Flashing looks like this.  In case you've missed it in some of my previous posts.

You can pick it up at your local hardware store.  I got mine from Lowe's, one of my most favorite stores, in the roofing asle.  It comes in different widths and lengths.  I used a 50' roll to make this headboard and came up one strip short of a complete queen headboard.  Luckily I had an extra piece left over from one of my previous projects.  One thing I noticed is the 50' roll seems to be a little thinner metal than the 10' foot rolls.  The 50' roll has indentions in it.  The 10' rolls don't, they are very smooth.  I was good with that though, thought it made it more interesting.  Oh... and you can sand this stuff with very fine sandpaper to make it less shiny if you like that look.  Just test your sanding skills on an extra piece of flashing before you start on the headboard to make sure you like it.  It can leave swirl marks if you're not careful.

All you need to do this project is a piece of MDF board, that you can have cut to size at the store (Lowe's, Home Depot....), aluminum flashing and a staple gun.  Not the paper stapler, but the big daddy one.

This was a queen size headboard, so my dimensions were 4' tall by 5' wide.  One piece of MDF board is 4' x 8', so I only had to make one cut.  Next, cut the aluminum flashing to size.  I used the 10" width so needed 11 strips.  6 horizontally and 5 vertically for the basket weave look.  Hopefully my crappy little diagram below will give the idea.  heehee.  Just weave the flashing strips over, under, over, under, over under... and so on, then do the next strip in the opposite order...

Leave an extra 2" on all sides to bend around to the back of the MDF board for your staples.  You'll need books or something kinda heavy to put at the ends of your flashing as you lay it out to keep it from rolling up.  I laid out and weaved all the flashing on the floor then laid the MDF board on top, then used a hammer to help bend the flashing to make it good and flat around all the sides, and stapled everything down. Make sure all your strips are butted up against each other before you staple.  There should be no gaps between the strips.

 Flip it over and you're all done.  Snazzy and less than a hundred bucks. 

So what do you think??

Smiles!

~Renew Redo~