Hello again, friends.

Two posts in one week!  I think this is a record for us.

We finally had a chance to catch up on life after being super busy the last few months.  It’s hard to believe that we’ve renovated 4 bathrooms and a house this year!  We finished our Pearl St. bathroom renovation in February, then bought a historic townhome in German Village that we renovated and furnished, and just finished remodeling a client’s dated bathroom last week, too.  Even though we loved doing all of these projects, we’re loving this much needed break from the craziness just as much 😉

We’ve been posting lots of progress photos on Instagram, including some of the master bedroom at our Pearl St. project…

… and the master bedroom at our new townhome. (Update: see more photos of this room & the new bathroom we added here!)

When we mentioned that we made the bed skirt ourselves out of painter’s drop cloths, and no sewing was involved, many of you asked for a tutorial.  Here goes!

Bryan started off by making a very basic bed frame out of plywood and 2×6’s.  It cost us about $50 and sits 18″ off the ground, allowing for storage underneath.  The headboard was a lucky $200 clearance find from Arhaus Outlet here in Columbus.  It was discounted because just the headboard was being sold, not the entire bed frame (which originally retailed at over $3,000!).

To snazz up the frame, we made a flowy, Restoration Hardware inspired bed skirt.  Between Michael’s and Home Depot, we were able to find everything we needed.  Total cost for us was under $50, since we had everything except for the cloths and tacks.

Materials Needed

• Two 4×15 regular 8 oz. canvas drop cloths (see below on how to measure)
• Tacks
• Fabric scissors
• An upholstery hammer (if you don’t have one, a regular small hammer will do the trick)
• A 6×9 drop cloth for the top (optional)

Measuring for the Skirt

Before going shopping, it’s important to take into account 3 things: 1) the drop, or distance between the bottom of your mattress and the floor, 2) the length of your bed that the skirt is going to cover, and 3) the gathered length of fabric you’ll need.

1) Drop

We had an 18″ drop between the bottom of the mattress and the floor. We wanted the skirt to pool a bit at the bottom, so we added 2″ to account for that. We also knew we would need 2+” extra to attach it to the top of the frame, so we rounded our drop up to 24″ just to be safe.  That number also worked really well with our 4′ x 15′ drop cloth – we only had to cut it once down the middle.

2) Length of the bed that the skirt will cover

These measurements assume that three sides of the bed will be covered with the bed skirt:

A Queen has 220 inches of space to cover (80in left + 80in right + 60in end = 220 inches total), or 19 feet
A King has 236 inches (80 + 80 + 76) of space to cover, or 20 feet.
A Full has 204 inches (75 + 75 + 54) of space to cover, or 17 feet.
A Twin has 189 inches (75 + 75 + 39) of space to cover, or 16 feet

3) Total gathered length of the bed skirt fabric

To get that romantic, expensive look on the bed skirt we made, we used about 3 feet of drop cloth per 1 foot of length. You can probably get away with 2, but just know that the more you stretch it, the more you change the look.  For our Queen bed, we multiplied the length from step two by 3 to get our total length of fabric needed.

A Queen needed 19′ x 3 = 57′ of drop cloth.
A King would need 20′ x 3 = 60′ of drop cloth
A Full would need 17 x 3 = 51′ of drop cloth
A Twin would need 16′ x 3 = 48′ of drop cloth

Getting Started

We used two 4’x15′ hallway drop cloths for our Queen bed, and cut them each in half to get two 2’x15′ strips.  The four 2×15 strips gave us about 60 feet of gathered length to work with, and 2 feet of height to work with.

To attach the skirt to the frame, we used tacks.  One fold a time, one tack at a time.

Having the skirt attached to the bed works for some people and won’t work for others.  We’ve made this skirt for four different beds so far, but none of them get high traffic or are exposed to lots of pets, frequent spills, dirt, etc. We vacuum and spot clean as needed, just as we would an upholstered bed or couch, and that does the trick. Even if this isn’t for you, you may be able to apply the concept to one of your own that you’re able to remove.

Because we had ugly plywood on the top of our frame, we covered the whole thing with another 6×9 drop cloth cut to size.  We folded the raw edges under to give it a clean look.

Then we added our mattress, made the bed, and voila!  It took us about 2 hours for the whole thing.

What do you think?  Would you make a bed skirt out of a drop cloth for your bed?