Easy DIY Re-Upholstered Headboard Without Sewing: Beginner Friendly Tutorial

     Last month, I completed my first full DIY project for our first house. I was able to successfully reupholster our guest room headboard, with no sewing required! This project turned out even better than I was hoping, and I'm excited to share the details and a little tutorial with you today.

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     Below you can see a picture of the queen sized upholstered headboard that I was going to be reupholstering. This was an older headboard that Ryan had owned for several years. You can see in the picture below that the fabric looks darker in the middle. That isn't a bad shadow in the picture... that's discoloration! This headboard had a lot of discoloration, and looked quite old and ratty.

{Living Room Oushak Rug Linked HERE!}

     My dream guest bedroom design for our house probably would've looked similar to how I've styled the rest of our home; colorful coastal with hints of grandmillennial. But we were generously gifted a guest bedroom furniture set from my in-laws, so I knew I had to design the guest room more around that. We were gifted a Queen Ann style traditional dresser and mirror, an additional highboy dresser, and a nightstand, all a classic darker wood color with antique looking gold accents and drawer pulls. No colorful coastal vibes in here! 😊

     After a visit to the historic Omni Homestead Resort last fall, I decided to base our guest room decor off of the guestroom that my friend and I stayed in at the Homestead! Lilac colored walls to offset the classic and darker wooden furniture, and crispy white bedding. My vision was starting to come to life after Ryan painted the room lilac! The only problem was the old and discolored upholstered queen headboard that we had. 

      TikTok tutorial videos had me convinced that I could reupholster our queen headboard myself, instead of having to buy a new one. I loved the idea of adding in a fun patterned fabric to the room. Something that would still coordinate well with the Queen Anne furniture in the room, but would also make the space a little more fun and modern. 

     I ended up finding the ideal upholstery fabric from Spoonflower! It's by textile artist Danika Herrick, and the print is called Monticello. It comes in several different color options, but I selected the one called "Dusty Blue Green and Butterscotch," since I thought that one would coordinate best with the walls and other furniture. Spoonflower has quickly become one of my favorite online retailers since we became homeowners! It's where our dining room wallpaper is from, and I was excited to try their fabrics for the first time. Spoonflower fabrics come in a ton of different material options, I opted to go with the Performance Linen upholstery fabric for this, and I was very pleased! Spoonflower fabrics aren't the cheapest, but they do have sales throughout the year. I waited until they had a 30% off all fabrics promotion to order.

      Other things I needed for this project: a staple gun, fabric scissors, and quilt batting. I purchased all three of those things at my local Hobby Lobby. ChatGPT told me how much fabric and batting I'd need, after I uploaded the dimensions of the headboard. It told me to get three yards of quilt batting and three yards of the Spoonflower fabric. It also advised me to make sure to get a "low-loft" quilt batting. I'm still not really sure what that means since I don't do quilting, but the fabric department salesperson at Hobby Lobby knew what that was and agreed that sounded right for this type of project. 

     I started out by using our drill to temporarily remove the headboard legs. I then placed the headboard frontside down onto the quilt batting. I then cut the batting until there was about 5-6inches extra surrounding each side. I then pulled the sides of the batting tightly onto the back of the headboard, and started staple gunning! This project takes lots of staples, since you want to make sure both the batting and the fabric are really on there tightly.

     I then repeated the same process with the upholstery fabric, once the quilt batting part was completed. The most tedious part of this whole process was cutting the excess batting and fabric. The stapling part was quite fun! 

     And pictured below is the finished product! I was so impressed by how it looked. I think the fabric choice really makes the headboard now look like it was from Ballard Designs or One Kings Lane, or another more expensive home goods retailer like those places. (Honestly it really reminds me of this headboard, but for a fraction of the cost!)

     And here's how it looks in our guest room! The room isn't fully complete just yet (I still need to add a window treatment, and we don't have any wall art in this room yet either), but I am just obsessed with how the reupholstered headboard looks in here! I added these brown accent pillows that actually came with our new family room couches, but we didn't have room for with other couch pillows that we had. I would also like to get a new nightstand lamp at some point, but for now this one that my in-laws gave us works just fine. We are off to a great start with this guest room, and I think the headboard is a big part of that! 

Project supplies linked below:

     God Bless,

     xoxo Annaliese