After spending much too much time whiling away the hours on Used.ca’s Pinterest page – I may have an addiction – I’ve noticed some awesome upcycling potentials.

Don’t have an old piece of furniture lying around waiting to be refurbished? No problem. Your local Used.ca sites have you covered.

Just search our sites for used furniture using the name of the items you want to find. In this case, simply search for beds or headboard. Better still use the free tab on our sites, there are so many free used furniture finds and they are perfect for DIY and upcycle projects.

How do you upcycle a bed?

There are a surprising number of ways you can reutilize an old headboard! The four headboards in the photograph below were found on UsedRegina.com, UsedVancouver.com, UsedPEI.com and UsedVictoria.com.

Headboards found on our sites

Following these headboard discoveries I turned back to my Pins for inspiration and a little matchy matchy action as to which headboard suited which DIY best – too many matches led to too many options – but I whittled down the list to two prime uses: benches and shelves.

Benches created from headboards

The lovely ‘Welcome’ bench above is from MyRepurposedlife.com. I’ll include a brief summary here, but visit the site for detailed instructions. Here’s the brief bench tutorial:

1. Footboard cut in half to be used as the sides of the bench and create pocket holes to secure -no glue needed.

2. Get a long piece of wood to use as a front brace (use whatever measurements are appropriate).

Note: For an alternate method with footboard used as the front brace instead of sides, see this tutorial from Scissors & Spatulas.com. This is where the top white bench picture came from.

3. Attach boards for the seat.

4. Apply paint primer, then your choice of paint.

5. Finally, should you want to incorporate a phrase or word on your bench grab some spray paint and a stencil and spray away.

Another option:

A jump (or swing) away from the typical bench is the hanging bench:

An awesome swing like this can be made the same way as tutorials above, but when you near the end, check these final steps on wikihow. Or you can build a porch swing like the one above minus a headboard with those instructions if you so desire. 

And finally, we have our shelving option:

DIY Headboard Shelf

This shelf, image taken from Etsy.com, is a beautiful addition to any kitchen or dining room and is super easy to make: sand, prime and paint the headboard, then either cut the footboard to the desired height to make for a more elaborately edged bottom shelf, or simply use any piece of wood at the desired size. Then simply screw, or glue in. Easy.

So these have been my tips and tricks, how about you? Have you made a headboard into anything before? Tell us your stories and send us pictures of your transformed item! We’d love to see them.

• Beautiful dark wood headboard bench
• Welcome bench DIY
• White bench DIY
• Hanging bench DIY
• Headboard shelf

Useful links

Look for headboards on your local Used.ca site