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  • Hi, I’m Emily

    Emily Fazio

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Finally, real towel racks

December 3, 2010

Final bathroom towel racks! Plenty of room for guest towels now. 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:

The bathroom towel rack, before. It was actually just a curtain rod that was strong enough not to bend under the weight of a towel. 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!

  • Heavy-duty toggle bolts will hold a ton of weight - these are the basic kind will do just fine, even though there are lots of expensive variations in fancy packaging.
  • Towel rack in. Whoops, a couple of extra misplaced holes that need to be patched.
  • Before patching, I used a razorblade to trim away the "fuzz". I didn't want my wall to appear to have any sign of damage, and I imagined the edges of holes looking "feathered" after patching.
  • Patched holes. Takes a day or so to dry completely, but and then it can be sanded down and painted.

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.

  • Final bathroom towel racks! Plenty of room for guest towels now.
  • Close-up of the new shower curtain fabric. Purchased at Target.
  • Bathroom shower curtain and hand towel rack.
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Bathroom

Emily
I'm a home improvement enthusiast, living a very merry DIY lifestyle. I've been a freelancer writer for 10+ years and you can find my work on popular home and garden sites, like HGTV.com. Follow me on facebook and instagram, or drop me a note.

Comment


Neil
January 29, 2013 at 11:11 pm
Reply

I really like your shelves and photos. I was doing some research for my new blog entry on remounting towel racks in wobbly holes when I saw one of your photos under “hole from towl rack”. Anyways, I have a post up (of two) about using an envelope and some tape for projects like yours, and it is perfect for your pilot hole tip (using a drill to find studs). Check it out if you want.



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  • HI, I’m Emily

    Emily Fazio

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