When Opposites Attract: Home Improvement Edition

This is how it goes around our house:

Me (looking at upholstered headboards on pinterest): I want one of these sooo bad! Why can’t we ever get anything nice and why is our bedroom so ghetto and awful and life is just so hard!!!

Mike (glancing over my shoulder): I could make that.

The next day:

Mike: I built a headboard out of some spare wood that I had and got some free foam from a carpet guy. Let’s go pick out fabric so we can get this finished.

Me: Whoa aren’t we moving a little fast? Before we pick out fabric I need to sift through all the options and figure out exactly what I want and price match cause upholstery fabric is super expensive and I should probably get some swatches and maybe buy some fabric online and agonize over it and return it and then get some new fabric and go through the process all over again. It could take a while.

Mike: Let’s just go look.

Lo and behold we end up finding fabric for like 3 bucks a yard that day. So then it’s up to me to figure out how to upholster the box spring to match the headboard and I’m thinking that I’ll spend the next couple of weeks attempting it and failing, but then my rockstar of a little sister comes over and pretty much does the whole thing for me because she is the greatest ever and also shares my husband’s strange addiction to DIY projects. We finish by midnight that night using a slight variation of this tutorial (Smash came up with the brilliant idea of sewing the fabric onto a sheet instead of onto the top of the boxspring. Genius).

After a coat of grey paint left over from our living room and some new lamps, a room that I thought was bound to remain a total eyesore for years is actually looking decent in a matter of weeks and all for about 100 bucks (not quite perfect yet, but it’s getting there. Also, this photo makes it look like the headboard is the same color as the wall but in real life it’s darker):

The embarrassing “before” picture. We seriously put zero effort into this room and it ended up being a random mess of old wedding gifts and cheap furniture (Hey Annie, recognize the Al Rounds masterpiece? Oh, the memories):

This whole project was a great reminder of how Mike balances out all my complaining, overthinking, procrastination, and complacency by simply getting crap done. The man’s a keeper.

It’s also an experience I should probably remember when he wants to build yet another outhouse-looking shed in our backyard this summer.