Rustic towel hooks in Guest Bathroom

Whew… sorry for the late post today but day after time change + a teething baby + a Monday = enough said!   Anyways, I worked on the guest bathroom last week and I am just loving how it is turning out!  I can’t wait to see the complete finished product – think it is going to look better than I even imagined.

So let’s go back – here’s the before from when we bought the house.

And here’s after I removed the handicapped bars and patched holes and painted. 

But I still needed someplace to hang towels.  I have grown to love hooks for towels instead of a towel bar in recent years.  It is easier/quicker to put towels up and honestly I just love the look of hooks.  This was an easy wall to incorporate hooks because you have the edge of the shower and what you don’t see behind the bathroom door is actually another door for the linen closet so there is a door frame there. 

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So here’s how I installed hooks for towels:

I picked up a basic 1x4x6 pine board at Home Depot and cut it to size.  That area between the tub and door frame was 40 inches.  Then I sanded and stained the board my new favorite stain color.  Have you tried this Briarsmoke color from Varathane?  I love this stain color.  I kept seeing it pop up on various projects and the Shanty2Chic sisters use it a lot so I decided to try it.  It is sort of a gray brown but still fairly dark.  Like a cooler version of Dark Walnut.  Anyways I am staining everything in this room with this stain and it will probably be my go to color from now on.

So I got my board stained and then had to decide on the placement for the hooks.  I picked up these Liberty oil rubbed bronze hooks at a discount closeout store a while back for $1.00 each – super great price!  Here’s some similar hooks here.  I placed them 5 inches from the edge and 10 inches apart.  I marked where my screws for each hook would go but didn’t attach them yet because I had a plan for how to hide where I mounted the board to the wall.

There was plenty of space behind each hook to screw the board to the wall and one of the placements even ended up in a stud so that was perfect.  You can see where I had pencil marks for the screws for the hooks and then I drilled a pilot hole and screwed a long drywall screw into the wood and into the wall – I did 2 screws under each hook.  So this board is not going anywhere!

Then it was just to install each hook and it was done!

Here’s the whole wall – I just absolutely love how this turned out!  I’ll share a tutorial and more on the window art later this week. 

Functional and pretty!  And very inexpensive – just my kind of project!

So here’s how my $100 budget for the room is looking after this project:

Spent so far – $0

Spent for this project –

• 4 hooks – $1 each = $4.00
• stain – $8.48 (but I will have like 3/4 the can left even after doing 2 more projects in this room)
• board – $3.47

Total spent –$15.95

Can’t wait to show you the next project on Wednesday!