Hope you had a great weekend! Today I’m sharing the follow up post to Wednesday’s cookbook stand, made from this old ladder.
To recap, I found this old ladder in the trash, it came with an embarrassing story to go along with it (story of my life) and so far I’m on project #2 with it. The cookbook stand idea was actually an after thought, but todays project was the original idea. Oh to be easily distracted : )
The original idea was to use the main pieces to create more storage in our rental bathroom by creating an over the toilet shelf unit. So, first things first, I had to disassemble the whole ladder, which in all honesty, took the longest out of any step!
There was drilling, cutting, screw driving, plier-ing… you get the picture. Once it was all separated, I had four long pieces at an equal height (the tallest possible so that they’d all be equal heights), and cut the pieces that used to be steps into four shorter pieces at 11″.
The 11″ steps got drilled into two of the long pieces to create braces for my shelves.
Next was time for the shelves. I picked up an 8′ 1×6 from the store, and cut it into 4 equal pieces (just under 24″ each). This week Target had a sale on it’s new line of Devine Color paints, so I picked up a test pot of the dark gray color, Compass, and gave all four pieces a few coats, followed up by a clear satin polycrylic. It turned out to be such a pretty color, I will definitely be picking up more!
Last but not least, I assembled the shelves to the sides using wood glue and screws. An additional support was added at the base of the stand to make it nice and sturdy.
Now all of my our stuff is off of our already small countertop, and we have an inexpensive storage solution for our bathroom.
The basket holds all of our face/teeth/beard supplies. I kept it real and left them all in there for you : ) My second favorite part, besides the actual shelf unit, is that IKEA metal kitchen utensil organizer. I actually use it to store my hot curling iron and straightener instead of letting them hang out on the counter to cool. It’s drilled into the shelf on the bottom so it doesn’t tip over and keeps everything neat and organized.
I tried to keep as many details from the original ladder as I could, and love how it all came together!
Also, how cute is this artwork? M got it from his grandparents, and it cracked me up that it was one of two pieces of artwork he had hung when we met.
And that wraps up project #2 from our old wood ladder!
How do you like our new bathroom storage? Working on any trash to treasure projects lately? Any fun weekend stories? I spent most of mine in home improvement stores- can’t say I’m too upset about that : )
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I love it!!! AND the IKEA utensil holder is genius. Why didn’t I know about this while I was in Dallas last week? Also, we totally have a little outhouse picture in our bathroom from my husband’s grandparents!!! They had it in their bathroom and then I picked it when Granny moved and we divided up the paintings.
Thanks Melissa! This outhouse picture is from M’s grandparents as well- that’s too funny!! It’s the one picture he took from her house when she moved too haha!