Finally, real towel racks

I’ll let you in on one of my major pet peeves: I hate when the bath towel can’t be hung to dry completely stretched out on the rack. Scrunchy towel is the worst. I can’t even tell you how many stores I’ve looked at just trying to find something that would be long enough to accommodate a towel (and I’m talkin’ normal size towels around 30″ in width – mine aren’t unnaturally wide). Even the brands with lots of variety didn’t offer something wider than 24″ – which is still not long enough to drape a towel across. (I recall finding some longer ones online, but they were ugggly. Like Brass. With fancy details that I would imagine seeing in a fancy new construction mansion.) I gave up looking after a few months, deciding instead to make my own towel rack using a sturdy curtain rod that had hung in one of the bedrooms. I installed it, and it worked wonderfully for a year, even though I never got around to painting it. Here’s what it looked like:

THEN… during a special trip to IKEA (so few and far between!), I stumbled through the bathroom section of the store and noticed that they had a LOT of towel rack options that were wide enough to suit a towel – 32″ – and they were inexpensive! I decided on one from the GRUNDTAL series (and a complementary hand towel rack, because my bathroom was lacking that) and brought it home to install. The best thing about these (besides being a soft stainless finish) is that each towel bar is actually two bars, stacked away from the wall, so I can really fit a lot of towels on each rack now (I’m trying to make my house more “company-friendly”). I had some leftover toggle bolts from installing the kitchen shelves, so that’s what I used for these – they hold hundreds of pounds of weight (maybe an exaggeration, but at least well over 100-lbs.), so I knew the new racks wouldn’t come out of the wall (maybe ever). Since the toggle bolts are wide, I had to drill 4 holes that were 5/8″ in diameter for each rack – fortunately, the part of the rack that touches the wall is about an inch wide, so the large gaping holes were fully concealed. Oh… except I did take a couple of stabs into the wall first, hitting studs that I didn’t want to attach to , so I needed to patch up those holes… that leads me to a handy tip: use a small drill bit to drill into the wall to test for a stud before knocking a 5/8″ hole into the wall. Anyways, they were easy patches, just extra work for myself. Here are some work-in-progress shots!

The shelves went up very easily and are super secure. I found some new towels to put on them (I love Marshalls – and the buy was even sweeter because I used gift card ordered with Thank You points). Oh! And I bought the first shower curtain for my house this week too – I didn’t have one because I was sort of OK keeping the clear plastic liner exposed, but the one I found was 50% off and a nice neutral gray with a subtle design that went perrrfectly with my room. Total cost of the update: <$20 for the racks. $15 for the curtain. $25 (from gift card) for the 4 tan and 2 striped towels.