DIY Door Daybed

What can you get when you combine an old door with an Ikea twin bed? Read to find out.

We have a cute little room in our house that obviously used to be a little girl’s room. It came complete with pink walls and a princess ceiling fan:

It’s an adorable room, but we couldn’t keep it as it was. We needed a functional room that could sleep a guest, but also serve as an office and a “storage” area. I didn’t want the bed to be the focus of the room, but I did want an extra bed in the house in case we had an extra guest or two. Therefore, we decided that a daybed situation would be our best option. The problem is – daybeds are dang expensive! And we had a whole large house to furnish! So, I hit up Pinterest for DIY daybed ideas and I came across this perfect image from The Vintage Round Top.

Side note: I would love to go to Round Top and stay. It fits my personality perfectly. Paige and Smoot are the owners, and I pretty much want to be them. They’re a successful H-town couple who went to the hill country and bought a farm house on a casual Sunday.

Anywho, back to my post. So I really liked their rustic door as a headboard (backboard?) idea. And it was perfect for us because we were #blessed with a TON of old original doors when we purchased our home. Literally, there were four or five old wooden doors stacked in our garage. So we pulled this oldie but goodie out:

This thing was seriously grime-ie from being stored in a questionable garage for years. We cleaned and lightly sanded it.

I wanted the bed to be sturdy, and look like an actual piece of furniture. At first, I thought David could just build me a platform situation, and then we could hang the door on the wall behind it. BUT, I had two problems with that idea 1. That door is really heavy to mount to the wall, and I would prefer not to have bolts in my wall 2. David already had a ton of projects on his to-build list for me. Building a bed frame would take at least a weekend or two of time, and I just really didn’t want to mess with it. SO! We went to Ikea (David’s favorite place on the planet) to see if we could find something we could hack. And we discovered this:

The Fjellse bed frame.

So we put on our creative hats, and decided that we could reconfigure this beauty to work with our design idea. It was the perfect door length, and since it was raw pine, we could paint the frame to match the door. We brought it home. I white-washed it the frame, and David got to work reworking it:

He cut the headboard part into two pieces, and stuck them on the ends of the frame, like so:

Then he filled the side panels with plywood:

Then he attached the door to the backside, and added a piece of trim to the top of the door to make it all match:

Then I gave the grimy door it a good white-wash paint job. I’m not very fancy, so my white-wash technique consists of mixing my wall paint with some water. My mix is about 40% paint and 60% water. I just slopped a few messy coats of the white-wash mixture on it, and it gave me the rustic but refined look I was going for. Plus, the white color matched the house color scheme perfectly. Here is it all painted sans the mattress: