Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Coat Rack Design Challenge

Tiffany, always a junkie for upcycling projects, gave me a challenge recently to create a coat rack for the RePlayGround design studio.

The design rules were as follows:
1) The coat rack must be able to be mounted to the wall
2) It must hang at least six items
3) The rack must be made out of repurposed items!

With these design aspects in mind, I decided to give some old wood coat hangers an unconventional twist with this Upside Down Coat Hanger Rack:



I started by cutting off all but 1" of one side of each coat hanger. This left enough space to mount the coat hangers onto a scrap wood 2 X 4. Next, we drilled screws from the back of the wood plank into the cut part of the coat hanger, making sure to space each hanger 4" apart. This took one person to line up the hanger to the wood and hold everything in place, while a second person screwed the pieces together. For extra security, I dabbed a bit of wood glue to the sawed off part of each hanger to make sure the hangers won't twist out of place when in use!



Now our coats are hanging around the design studio in upcycled style!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

this is a GREAT use of old, wooden coat hangers; however, my personal opinion [don't shoot the messenger, please] is that it would have been much more aesthetically pleasing IF they had trimmed the other side of the hangers as well. They just seem a bit awkward, or out of place once the hangers are mounted to the faceplate. A simple two to three inch trim up and then sanding to round off the ends a bit would have still allowed for hats to fit above jackets & I think, would have been much more pleasing to the eye. Other than that one little thing I think this is a great project that I am going to try. But, you know I'm going to have to trim off that extra two to three inches. LOL!

Unknown said...

In my personal opinion this would have been much more pleasing to the eye IF they had also trimmed off the other side of the hangers. Just two to three inches less would have still allowed room for hats to sit comfortably perched above coats & jackets without interfering with them & would have looked better too. Other than that one little thing this is a GREAT project that I'm probably going to try out myself, of course, I'm going to trim off the other side of the hangers, but I'm still going to try it out! LOL!!