Save the (Headboard) Drama for your Mama (Or Papa, as the case may be...)

Oh, hiiii. I've been an absentee blogger this past week. My apologies. Real life has been busy (in a good way!) and blog life has suffered, unfortunately. But I'm back! With another headboard post!

So, I finally got around to hanging my headboard on the wall. IT. WAS. DIFFICULT. Unnecessarily so. The problem was that our first attempt wasn't very well thought-out. Consequently, it made the project way more complicated than necessary. After a much-needed frustration/lunch break, SuperDad came to the rescue yet again and delivered a MUCH more simple and straightforward hanging technique.

Here is the first thing we tried, a.k.a. the WRONG way to hang a headboard on the wall. We had this little kit:

Mostly, we wanted it for those D-hooks, which would go on the back of the headboard itself. We reasoned out that putting the hooks 2/3rds of the way up the headboard would keep it flat against the wall (i.e., not floating out at the bottom/top). This is great in theory. Unfortunately, trying to hook the D-hooks onto screws in the wall when they're a foot out of the reach of your fingers is pretty much impossible. We tried using both long skinny pliers and twine to hold the hooks upright but neither worked. They kept flopping down and we couldn't get them to hook onto the screws. Eventually, we decided to move the D-hooks higher up on the back of the headboard - approximately 1.5 inches from the top. That way, we were able to reach behind and hold the D-hooks in the right position to slide them over the screws. Much better.

Original placement (after careful measurement)

D-hook in place

After moving both D-hooks closer to the top of the headboard.

The second problem we encountered was that the wall anchors that came with the kit didn't have washers, so the screw disappeared into the wall. Without anything to grab on to, we couldn't lock the screw a couple centimeters out, which was necessary to hang the D-hooks on the screws. Luckily, I had these metal hollow wall anchors on hand, so we decided to use those instead of the anchors that came with the kit. I'm making this sound like a much faster decision-making process than it actually was ;)

SuperDad also decided to add an extra washer in between the screw and the anchor, so that the screw stood out even further from the wall. This allowed the D-hooks to have better purchase on the screws, making the headboard much less likely to slip off accidentally.

Don't mind all the pencil marks from our many attempts ;)

And here's the finished product:

If you remember what the headboard looked like initially, you may notice that it's a few inches shorter now. That's because it was propped up on top of the mattress in the initial post, and now that it's hung directly on the wall, it's a few inches lower than the mattress, as seen in the photo below.

When we finally figured out what the heck we were doing, the project was pretty simple and only took about 15 minutes. We really made it much more complicated than it needed to be. If you try it yourself - learn from our mistakes: use heavy duty metal anchors and attach the D-hooks high enough on your headboard that you can easily reach them with your fingers. So, now the headboard project is officially 100% done. Sigh of relief.