Well…It’s been awhile, maybe 1-2 winters since I was able to save some raised panel wainscot from the dumpster. At first glance I was hoping it was mostly solid cherry, but when it was demo’d and I do mean demo’d it turns out 90% of the paneling is veneered cherry on a softwood core. Without it being solid cherry and the amount of damage that occurred to the face veneer from its initial removal and subsequent delivery and unloading to my garage left the material in tough shape. Essentially, the paneling could be re-used but in a paint grade scenario where we cover up the cherry. Normally I would be totally opposed to this but where the wood was veneered and some of the gouges in that veneer so deep, this was really the only realistic option.
I have been at a loss for a good use for the material and considered tossing it myself until Wendy suggested that we needed a head board or shelf for our bed. From here we started chatting about the requirements of the headboard when Wendy suggested that we used the paneling that I had in the garage and the rest is history. A few quick measurements of our king size bed, and the paneling pieces I had in the garage and we had some rough dimensions of what we were going to do. In addition to measuring we also hit up Pinterest looking for some inspiration. Surprisingly Pinterest has become a pretty good resource for inspiration for me when it comes to refining project design.
A pin that most resembled what Wendy was looking for was this raised panel headboard from Amanda Holder’s website. Now there are some design features that we will be tweaking on our headboard, for example we are not having an open bottom, and we are using two levels of raised paneling for a solid look. On the sides we really liked the shelving idea for the top panel section and we decided on two shelves versus three shelves on her headboard. The bottom section of the sides will be a solid panels as well. Our crown molding will be a little more involved as I recycle some salvaged door casings as well but from my hand sketch, or plan below we are borrowing a lot of the same basic details, while tweaking it for our needs and materials that we have on hand.
The basic ideal is to attached the raised paneling to a 1/2” plywood sub frame that can be disassembled and brought up a flight of stairs in easily manageable pieces. The first step was removing all of the raised panels from the wainscot. Luckily for me all of the wainscot had these fantastic clips that held the raised panels in place. The only bad thing about them was that the screws were for a flat headed screwdriver, which was a slight pain to remove, but definitely better than the panels being nailed or glued in place.
Frames less the panels!
With the panels removed the frames were much lighter and more manageable. As you can see the edges of the frames are in rough shape. After looking at them for a while I discovered that of it made the top, bottom, and sides of the panels the same width of the the stiles (3-1/4” wide) I can cut off a lot of the damaged and rough wood and be left with a nice clean edge that looks like we planned to have all of the wood 3-1/4” in width to start width. Even though they were lighter they were too wide to run them though my table saw in its current set-up, so outside I went with a true piece of 5/4 pine that was 8’ long acting as a straight edge for my circular saw.
A couple quick passes and the frames cleaned up remarkable well and I could not resist but do a quick mock-up for the wife of our future headboard in a head on view. Now this is missing the 6” base, the raised panels and some trim at the top, but you can get the idea.
The next steps will involves some 1/2” plywood as I create the base and sub frame for the raised panels.
