My Ghetto-Rigged Guest Room Headboard

Ghetto rig: To fix something in the cheapest, fastest, and laziest way.

I Ghetto rigged my stereo.

- Courtesy of UrbanDictionary.com

While rearranging the furniture in my in-progress home office/guest bedroom, I felt like the guest bed really needed a headboard, or something to anchor it to it's new wall I moved it to (and a 20 foot wall at that).

Here's a quick look at the furniture layout I'm going for, that I whipped up in Illustrator:

Since in reality, nobody is going to sleep in this guest bed (except maybe my BIL will need to crash once or twice after one too many beers), I wanted to spend zero dollars on this half of the room. So I moved two small shelves on to either side of the bed, to be used as makeshift bedside tables. But that left a big hole on the wall where a headboard should go.

(Go ahead and ignore all of the junk on the bed. Also, ignore that pink comforter, it was just a placeholder that the cats could get their hair on. And yes, the box spring is on the floor. I couldn't find the screws to the bed rails after our move, and so I gave up and am just going to leave it on the floor for now. It makes the room feel bigger anyway!)

However, I didn't just have an extra headboard laying around. Nor did I want to buy fabric and padding to cover a piece of wood to make a headboard. Not to mention the fact that I didn't have a big piece of wood on hand.

But you know what I did have on hand?

A big flat box that my big corner desktop came in. And some green valance curtains from our old kitchen that just happened to fit into my green, white and taupe color scheme from my office inspiration board.

Enter the most inexpensive, ghetto-rigged, placeholder-for-a-year-until-we-move-and-buy-real-furniture headboard. Basically just a box, two curtains and some tape.

 

Yeah, 'cause I'm cheap creative like that!

But it actually doesn't look that bad in person, just sandwiched between the wall and the mattresses. No, really, I swear! I was all about just trying it and scrapping the idea if it looked like crap, but it's not too bad, especially to the tune of $0, and the fact that nobody is ever actually going to sleep in this bed.

 

 

See? I knew all of those empty boxes from IKEA were piling up for a good reason! I wonder if there is anywhere else I can use the cardboard as temporary decoration in the next year....

Have you ever had to ghetto rig something in your home because you didn't want to actually spend money on it at the moment?