DIY Headboard from an old Door

My husband and I have been redoing our master bedroom. It's been needing an update...

It was painted a dark teal/green color that wasn't so horrible, but it was an old paint job that needed some touch ups. Also, it was flat paint. I just don't like the look of flat paint. It shows dirt and fingerprints really badly. 

Last summer, I repainted all of our bedroom furniture a light cream color that brought a lot of brightness into the room in spite of the dark paint on the walls. After scouring Pinterest, I decided to paint the walls a really pretty gray color to make the room feel bigger. 

When I was painting it, I added some of this stuff to my paint. It made the room smell so fresh! I will never paint without it!

Once the paint was on the walls, the room took on a whole new look! It was still missing some final touches, and still is, but the main thing I wanted to do was to make a headboard for our bed frame. 

I have seen people make their own upholstered headboards, and I loved the look of that. I also saw some made from shutters, doors, stretched fabric, pallet wood... I had no idea what I wanted. I asked for suggestions from friends, and one friend told me about a wonderful store in Cullman, AL about an hour from my house. It's called Southern Accents Architectural Antiques. The owner and his team go to buildings that are going to be demolished and salvage anything and everything they can. We made a plan to go check it out. 

The store was absolutely amazing! Mantles, mirrors, windows, doors, all kinds of old hardware... It was like antique heaven. They had the main building, then a secondary building in the back, two outdoor garden areas, and an entire separate warehouse where they store things that haven't made it to the actual store yet. We browsed for hours. 

At the warehouse, I found a gorgeous, solid wood door. It was the exact right length to be a queen-sized headboard. The man at the store told me that the door was from a building built in 1920 in Tuscaloosa close to The University of Alabama's football stadium. The building was damaged four years ago when a streak of over 200 tornados ravaged our state. The building could not be saved, but they were able to salvage some of the parts. 

Hearing the history behind the door absolutely sold me on it. Knowing that it was from my state gave it great significance to me. We loaded it up and drove it home. 

I knew I wanted to paint it to match my other furniture. I gave it thre coats of my cream colored paint. 

I sanded the edges and some other areas to give it that distressed, worn look of my other pieces. 

The last thing to do was to add the boards to the sides to raise it from the ground. I bought pine 1x4s from Lowe's and my husband attached them to the door after I measured where they needed  to go.

Finally, our bedroom is starting to come together.