Back in 2017, my wife’s nan passed away. Among the things she’d kept, things that were sentimental to her, was a headboard. It sat in our garage since 2017, until the other week my wife looked at it and said, “I really don’t know why I kept this now, we should throw it away.”
So I moved it. Put it somewhere else in the house and didn’t say a thing.
For the next week I kept thinking about what I could actually do with it, rather than just let it go to landfill. My wife loves reading, especially while chilling in bed, and I’d built plenty of things before from reclaimed scaffold boards, desks, tables, TV units, old wood turned into something with a bit more life left in it. So I put that to the test and set about turning the headboard into a bookshelf.
Roughly 1,000 staples
The process started with taking the headboard apart, which meant pulling out something in the region of a thousand staples holding the fabric and foam in place. Once that was done, I reshaped and cut the foam and material down to a smaller piece that would sit properly against an old scaffold board I had lying around, the same material I always seem to have kicking about for one project or another.
THE BUILD, STEP BY STEP — swipe or scroll →
The part that actually matters
Here’s the bit I’m genuinely proud of. I didn’t just want to reuse the headboard, I wanted to build her nan’s memory into it, quietly, without making a big thing of it.
The distance from the bottom of the shelf board to the top of the headboard is 28cm. Her nan was born in 1928.
The width of the shelf itself is 17cm. Her nan passed away in 2017.
Nobody needs to know that to look at it and think it’s a nice shelf. But my wife knows, and that was really the whole point. I kept as much of the original board as I could rather than starting from scratch, repurposing what was already there instead of replacing it outright. The heart-shaped hands and the gold brackets holding it to the wall came from Amazon, small finishing touches on top of everything reclaimed.
Why this one mattered more than most
I’ve built a lot of things from scaffold boards over the years, but most of them are just furniture, useful, sturdy, nothing more sentimental than “we needed a desk.” This one was different. It took something that was about to be thrown away entirely, something with real weight attached to it, and turned it into a piece my wife now actually uses every day, filled with the books she loves reading.
She’s already asked for a small plant for the corner of the shelf. I’ll take that as a sign it landed the way I hoped it would.