Today I feel like a grown-up.

I realize that seems like a strange statement, but there's truth to it.

Despite having turned 37 just a few days ago, I've been sleeping on the same shitty futon mattress since I was in high school. Back in the day, it was a pretty fantastic mattress and I used to sleep like a rock on it; however, it's been nothing but a back-busting collection of lumps and divots for a number of years. Hills and valleys, y'all. It was not good.

This past Sunday, Eric and I made a quick trek to Ikea and got a new mattress. Because Ikea is the mecca of inexpensive solutions to things like a lumpy mattress (I know, first-world problems), we were able to procure a mattress without bankrupting ourselves... and because the foam mattresses come very tightly rolled up, it fit in the backseat of my car without any issues.

I resisted the urge to get any new bedding to go with it, but I still had a desire to gussy things up. Our bed is the same wooden futon frame that I've had forever. It's very no-frills, and I thought about adding a headboard.

Flash-forward to Monday afternoon. I was doing laundry and realized that I had some pegboard attached to a shallow wooden frame that had been sitting in the basement after I saved it from being thrown away at the bookstore a number of years ago. It was almost the perfect size to act as the base for an upholstered headboard... The gears in my mind started to turn.

I pulled the pegboard out of the basement a couple of days later, measured it, and toddled off to Jo-Ann's to look at fabric. I was able to score a couple of yards of 54" embroidered decorating fabric and a couple of yards of batting both for 50% off (thank goodness for sales that are a better deal than the coupons they send out). I also picked up some KILZ white-tinted primer in the event there was some sort of horrible basement funk that had gotten into the wood. And then I made dinner.

The pegboard was about two and a half inches too tall for the space, so I sawed that down and re-attached the side of the frame. Then I put down some of the eleventy billion sales ads that come in the mail that were in the to-be-recycled pile and primed the crap out of the thing. Walter Kitten was intrigued by the paint roller but thankfully didn't get his paws into the primer (now I know how it's going to go the next time I decide to paint any walls around these parts).

This morning I went ahead and assembled everything: foam mattress topper that had been purchased from Target when the back-to-college items were 75% off a couple of years ago, batting, fabric, scissors, and staple gun. I trimmed down the foam, wrapped the batting around it, and stapled it to the pegboard's wooden frame. Thankfully the fabric has a repeating, geometric pattern so it was easy enough to get it positioned correctly and then stapled to the frame as well.

I'm still not so good at getting the corners perfect, but they're tidy enough to keep me happy (and prevent me from staring and grousing at the whole thing).

I wasn't sure how to attach it to the wall, but it turns out that the bed frame holds it up securely enough that we didn't need to make a trip to the hardware store in search of fasteners.

I think the next upstairs project will involve painting the half wall behind the bed so there will be some more contrast between it and the headboard. I asked Eric if he had any thought with regard to what color might look good, but he didn't have any input. Obviously you can see that I like purple and green; I'm also fond of chocolatey brown and pumpkin orange.

Things to consider: the carpet is a terrible shade of mauve (inherited from the former owners of the house, obvs) and should hold no relevance in the choice of color because, sadly, nothing in the world will ever match it. I'm not sure if we'd wind up with a wooden floor or carpet in a more respectable (read: neutral) color.

I'm open to suggestions; please embrace your interior designer and give me your opinion(s).