I very rarely wear jeans or shorts. Most of the time you will find me in a dress, sometimes a skirt. Jeans and shorts are convenient because you can just fold them up and stack them away in a drawer, but dresses require hanging, and hanging requires lots of closet space. Closet space is one thing we don’t have a lot of in the Bentley household. I grew up with a pretty big closet, and our last two apartments had huge walk-in closets, so moving to our current apartment with the barely-counts-as-a-hole-in-the wall closet space was quite an adjustment for my dresses and I. My clothes started migrating over from the closet to the stairwell and then took up residence on the blinds of our bedroom windows.
This was not acceptable to my needs-to-be-neat personality, so what to do? Husband to the rescue of course! Or maybe he just grew tired of my complaining about lack of hanging space…
Anyway, I took to Pinterest for some garment rack inspiration. We have a second bedroom that doesn’t really get used, so we had enough room to fit a decent sized rack. Initially I wanted a rack that had wheels, but after looking at pictures and totaling up the price of all the parts, we realized that making a wall-mounted rack would be much less expensive while still getting the job done.
Here are a few of the photos I found to help show Steve what I was picturing. They are from here, here, and here.
I can’t take credit for much more than the idea of solving our closet problem with a garment rack and finding pictures of pretty ones that I liked. Steve did all the structure designs and material research, and I basically sat on a crate in the plumbing aisle of Home Depot while he picked out the items he would need to build the thing. Having a husband is awesome 🙂
Steve started out by lining up the pieces on the floor and then screwing them all together. He wrapped the end of the bars in plumbers tape before attaching the curvy pieces, but I honestly have no idea why. Once everything was put together, he used the drill to screw the two round pieces into the wall and waalaa!, a garment rack was born!
It only took about an hour from start to finish, but we both needed a little food fuel and entertainment to get through the construction. Since Steve was so wonderful for putting the rack together for me, I was tempted to not showcase his movie choice, but I just couldn’t resist. Bend, and snap!
I begged and begged to paint it all yellow like one of the Pinterest pictures that I saw, but we (ahem, Steve) decided against it since the industrial feel of the exposed pipe wasn’t too shabby to look at anyway. I did paint the piece that touches the floor yellow just to see what it would look like, but it didn’t impress Steve enough to convince him to paint the whole thing. I was okay with leaving it as is for now since it’ll be easier to adapt to the decor of our next house.
Socrates and I were of course very useful during this whole process…
I didn’t think I was going to like the wall mounted option as much as a rolling garment rack, but I really actually like it a little better. It feels like it’s more apart of the room since it’s attached to the wall, and I’m not sure how the rolling wheels would have worked on carpet anyway. It’s also easy to vacuum under as opposed to having to roll it out of the way to clean. And all the dresses the were currently residing in plastic bins stored under the bed are now happy to have a place to call home.
life write now 