I know I’ve said it a million times, but with each project I become more and more impressed with Dan’s creativity and learn-on-the-fly carpentry skills. But what’s even better is when he makes something out of seemingly nothing. Like leftover plywood and trim. Before I knew it, he was off to the races on using these left over materials to build a coat rack in the basement.

This was more of a utility project rather than something that will be on display. And while we do have a refinished coat rack in our foyer and new mudroom storage in our basement they still weren’t quite the right spaces for the build-up of coats we have (mostly Dan, who has like 5 coats for every season)

For this coat rack, the idea was to build a shelf above with a rack below. Dan made the top shelf out of leftover plywood, cutting it 4.5 feet wide and 3 inches deep. Underneath, the backdrop of the coat rack was cut just a bit smaller at 4 feet, and would be ten inches tall. To connect the two pieces, he then added crown molding that was left over from the mudroom storage, which gives the coat rack a way-too-fancy-for-the-basement look. And because there was extra 1×2 laying around, he added that along the bottom edge of the coat rack to finish it off.

After the build was complete, he finished it off with a bit of white paint and a lot of black hooks (8 to be exact).

We put the coat rack in a grab-and-go spot in our basement, just on the other side of the wall of our mudroom storage. This is where coats tended to pile up anyway, so now we were at least giving them a home.

You may (or may not) be able to tell from this pictures that our basement ceiling is painted a dark gray, which was another recent adventure. We inherited lovely green and white spray painted rafters, and Dan finally couldn’t take staring at the ugliness anymore and snapped. Luckily we have a painter in the family and were able to borrow his paint gun for the weekend to spray those ceilings down. We previously had gray walls as well, but decided that white would contrast better with the ceiling and give the basement more of a clean look. Five times and counting for painting those walls.