How to Turn an Old Door into a Headboard

saw this in martha stewart magazine forever ago

and made a mental note: i want to make one of those!  so....8 yrs later...
we followed these directions for making the headboard


my husband did 99% of the work! and it was hard!
we started with this:

the door was found at an antique store in slc....we actually bought about a dozen doors from them and refinished most of them to use in our house...ya know, like doors (not headboards:) but, we had some extras lying around.
they had about a hundred years worth of lead paint layered on them so hubs lovingly stripped the door..this is the only time in our marriage i let him play with stripper (s) haha

i helped with the sanding a lil bit :) hubs was worried about inhaling lead paint so i was obligated to wear this mask {and yeah, my hair usually does look that fabulous :p }

Then came the fun part!! painting it!
I was inspired by my friend Leonora's photographs: check em out, check em out {uh, yeah, those are lyrics to a song....nobody probably know what i'm talking about ;) }

photos courtesy of: yellowheartart.blogspot.com

Aren't the buoys awesome??? so, i wanted to replicate this look for my headboard...and several times in the process of re-creating this i thought "am i insane?!" but I think it turned out awesome!

details

if you care to know how to do this here are the steps:  (and, yeah, it took me a few tries to get it right)
1.  beat the heck out of the door.  i used a hammer and a screw...lay the screw down and hit it with a hammer on the twisty part, it makes a cool design :)
2.  cover that bad boy with all sorts of funky paint colors {trust me, i did some not so funky colors the first time and it's not so great}
3.  cover those funky colors with wax ...i used my husbands snowboard wax cause that's what i had on hand.  a candle might possibly work..any kind of hard wax would probably do {trust me, you want to put a lot of wax on this bad boy.  i did just a little bit of wax the first time and it wasn't so great}
4.  paint the top-coat. i used a fabulous turquoise :)
5. while the paint is still wet-ish start scraping it off.  this works best when the paint is super-sticky still- but not too wet...but not too dry.  uh-huh, you get the point right? {if you wait too long, the paint won't come off}
6.  i coated mine with a high-gloss clear spray paint because i thought it'd look super awesome high gloss (and it does)

wherever the wax was, the paint will easily rub off.  i just used the clean end of a stir stick i had sitting around....or use the dirty end, i don't care :)

so, it's pretty easy, (the painting part atleast) if you have me as your guide {which i didn't...that's why it took me a few times}

still working on completing the look w/more pillows