Upcycled Headboard

When I moved out of the dorms and into an apartment, it was fully furnished. But, I wanted to get some custom pieces to make it feel more like home. So I bought a room divider. At first, it's purpose was to help organize a room I would be sharing with a roommate. Then things changed and it was just me in one bedroom and another roommate in another bedroom.

Above is my old bedroom. You can see the room divider served as my headboard. I purchased it from Hobby Lobby, originally priced at $79.99 but on sale for $40. It followed us to our first apartment together and kind of hopped from place to place. When we moved to our new place, we decided to put a lot of stuff in a closet while we lived in the space and decided what we liked and wanted, decor wise.

We threw around a lot of headboard ideas, particularly ones made from reclaimed wood like I showed you guys here. But, after getting our dresser (I will share all of those details as the room comes together), we just didn't think that style of headboard would a cohesive room make. This prompted us to look at our other options and we remembered our faithful room divider.

Black would have been too dark, so we threw around some other color options and landed on a grey-blue idea. We looked at the options available in spray paint and found the perfect color- just what we had envisioned. Slate blue Rust-oleum. We bought 2 cans of the color and just 1 of primer.



 

Our reasoning for only buying 1 can of primer was that full coverage wasn't super important. The material of the room divider is like that of a basket, and you can clearly see the weave pattern. Because of this, we were confident that the paint would stick, but we didn't want to risk getting a different color by just painting the black material.



So I got to work taking the divider apart. While doing that, I saw that this piece wasn't super high quality. A few screw heads were bent and wonky, making it difficult to unscrew them. The metal hinges had also become discolored and bent up a bit.

 We have a garage now (yay!) so we set up a painting station and got to work. One coat of primer, 2 coats of paint, just following the drying time instructions of the paint.

Before, Middle, Finished

See that texture??

We LOVE the color. And the texture of the room divider. We only painted on side because there wasn't enough paint to do both sides (and the other side is up against the wall... sides and top are painted, though). 



I didn't reattach the divider because 1. The hardware was trash and 2. The pieces together weren't wide enough for our queen (even though they were perfect for my full size).

What do you guys think?? We still need some throw pillows and are debating a couple other additions to the new headboard (like maybe a big M hanging in the middle). But we will see as we live with it! Anyone one else use a room divider for things other than adding a separation to a room.