DIY: Industrial Towel Rack

Hello! Today I am really excited to share our latest project with you! It is one of those projects that is fairly easy, not very time consuming, but has a major impact. Definitely my favorite kind of project!

First, let's talk about supplies.

Here is what you'll need:

6- 3 1/2" Black Steel Pipe Nipples
6- Black Steel Floor Flanges with 1/2" openings
6- 1/2" Black Steel Caps
24- 3/4" Screws for Floor Flanges (I also call them "bases")
2+- Mounting Screws
*We used 3, but if you use a longer/shorter board, adjust accordingly :)
Power Drill
Screw Driver
(either/or will do, but the drill makes this job a lot easier

To begin, we first measured where we wanted to place each of the hooks so they would be evenly spaced. Our board (after cutting) was 45 3/8". Since we had 6 hooks, we divided the board into 7ths so that there would be even spacing on both ends and between each of the hooks. Our final measurement was a hook every ~6.5". If you are using more/less hooks or a longer/shorter board, just use the same math as above to come up with your spacing.

If you look closely at the board, you can see the holes for the mounting screws and the markings for where the bases were to be mounted.

We chose to use these screws mainly because they were pretty. You can use whatever you'd like as long as the heads are big enough to not slip through the holes of the bases.

Make sure to put on some good music while you work! We were listening to our Boston record that we are currently obsessed with.

After measuring and marking the board (we set each base on the board and traced the holes so we would know where to drill later), we took it to the bathroom and measured where the studs were. We went ahead and drilled the holes in our board for the mounting screws so we could make sure that the hooks didn't cover the holes. We found that one of the screws would be under one of the hooks, so we knew we were going to have to wait to screw that one down until after the rack was mounted (more on that later). 

Now that we had everything laid out, it was time to start mounting the bases. We just realigned the bases with the marking from earlier and started screwing them down.

You can use a power drill for this part and it will go a lot faster. We started with a screw driver because we didn't have a flat head drill bit, but we ended up "making one" because we were lazy.

After you get the base screwed down, you can go ahead and screw in the other pieces. We went ahead and screwed down all the bases at once before we put the rest of the pieces together.

Here is my other "helper"

You can tell from the picture that one of the bases isn't mounted yet. This is the one that was going to cover one of our mounting screws. We just left it off until we had the whole thing mounted on the wall. We made sure the board was level and then just screwed it into the studs to make sure it wasn't going to fall later. After we assembled the caps and nipples to the bases, we went back with a pair of channel locks and tightened them even further. This step probably wasn't necessary, but we did it anyways.

 Here is the final product!

I'm totally in love with how it turned out! I was worried that the wood wouldn't match our bathroom because we don't really have much natural wood in there, but it was perfect. It added some much needed character to our otherwise boring bathroom. 

So what do you think? Let me know in the comments and if you decide to make one of your own, I'd love to see it!

xo-Nancy