When we lived in Bretton Woods, NH, we bought a Select Comfort bed.  The bed came with a plastic base made from about a half a dozen sections that sat on the floor.  I never liked the base, so I built a new base out of pine and bought some turned legs to elevate the top of the base to about 16" above the floor.  The other thing I didn't like about the bed was there was no head board.  ​

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At this point in my furniture building, I was building furniture out of pine.  I hadn't moved into hardwoods.  Just like the other things I had built for our house, I made the head board out of pine.

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Side note:  Nancy and I would go to Home Depot to pick up wood, and I would pick through the 1x4, 1x6, and 1x8 pine boards until I was satisfied that I had found the best of the wood that was available.  Nancy would stay in the area pretending not to know the clown that was rearranging all the pine wood boards and leaving the bad ones and taking the good ones.

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The biggest problem with building the headboard was designing the headboard.  I looked at hundreds of pictures of headboards and didn't find much to inspire my design.  Also, we wanted more than a headboard.  We wanted a place to store the stuff that you want near your bed.  So, we needed shelves, and we needed lights for the shelfs, and we needed power for the lights, chargers, Sleep Number bed pump, and electric blanket controllers, etc.  The shelves required were easy enough to design, but I wanted to be able to sit up in bed and be able to lean against the headboard.  This presented a different problem.  How do I provide a headboard to lean against and have access to shelves?  Easy, sliding panels.