I have “it’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to” stuck in  my head, except the lyrics are “it’s my blog and I’ll brag if I want to…braaaag if I want to….” And yeah, I want to. For this one (long) post I will brag on Javier, who built the most fabulous, luxurious bed for us this summer. Oh, and a tool shed in the back, which is also fabulous if a bit less luxurious. AND he just finished making a tufted, padded headboard for the bed. What’s next? Well, last night he drew the blueprints for our landscaping out front…and he’s building a coffee table in his wood working class. I could go on but…I’d rather just show off the photos of these amazing finished projects and go from there.

I’ll start with the toolshed, which he built back in April.  In my head, building a toolshed was a 3-month long endeavor; surely this was a project that would require some kind of professional at some point. Javier, who can’t wait for anything once he has a goal, finished the shed in 4 weeks. I helped when I could, but Javi found the plans online and had this awesome building up in no time at all. Of course as soon as it was up it was completely full; our bikes, wheelbarrow, mower,  many saws, yard / landscaping tools and scrap wood left room for little else. I’m planning to paint it yellow at some point, but unlike Javier, my plans just build up in the back of my head waiting for inspiration or desperation to push me over the edge and finally complete something…luckily it’s beautiful as it is without the yellow paint.

Javier got the idea for the bed from a youtube video, and he altered the plans slightly to fit our style. The bed is two gigantic boxes with six drawers in each box. I helped when and where I could; the nail gun was fun new terrain for me, and cutting the wood to the precise sizes was a two-person job. We picked out a beautiful satin-finish, off-white paint for the outside of the bed, and we spent a lot of time sanding, priming, sanding, painting, sanding and painting again to make those drawers look beautiful. We bought the handles from Amazon, and once all of the pieces were assembled we somehow managed to move those boxes upstairs and into the room.

Once we had the boxes in place, we measured the distance between them based on the mattress size and made a platform with cuts of 2x4s that bridged the gap between the boxes. I dread the day that we move and have to dissemble the bed…but for now it is 100% solid and insanely heavy, especially with the drawers. Once the bed was in the room we were able to reoccupy our space, but we have no other furniture in there! It seemed really empty until we finished the beautiful headboard…

Javier made his first foray into the world of padded headboards when he built one for my grandma last Christmas. We picked out a slightly different shape for our headboard, and in lieu of picking a patterned fabric we decided to try our hand at tufting. We bought the wood, batting, padding and upholstery last week, and the frame of the headboard was finished before the weekend.

The tufting was the most time-consuming aspect of this project. The fabric-covered buttons were difficult to make due to the thickness of the upholstery, and Javier wound up having to make an extra 10 or so because the tops of the buttons kept popping off. Blindly sewing the buttons to the headboard through holes that we couldn’t see underneath the padding was excruciatingly slow and frustrating, but watching the tufting come together a little at a time was so exciting. We attached the headboard to a frame, then slid it into place behind the bed! We thought we would have to attach the headboard to the back of the bed, but the bed and headboard are so heavy that they don’t move at all once they are in place.

The finished bed is gorgeous – and our room is starting to come together little by little. OH! I almost forgot – Javier also had to make a couple of bedside tables as a last-minute fix to an unforeseen problem. It didn’t occur to us that a standing bedside table would block the drawers from opening, so Javier quickly built two floating tables that attach to the wall and I painted them the same white as the bed. I also found a beautiful crystal lamp at goodwill last week that fits perfectly on one of the tables…I just need to keep my eye out for a similar one for my side.

So, that’s my Javi-project update! It’s always an adventure, and now we have a Pottery Barn-style bed for a fraction of the cost and the added bonus that Javier made it. On to the next project!