Towel Bars Beware II: Towel Barred Harder

Wow....that title sounds unfortunate.

So when we last left off, this shelf had been built but not hung in its rightful place.  Unfortunately, since I built this shelf from scratch, it didn’t come with any hanger thingys already attached.  Weird, I know.

After a quick bit of research, the hanging hardware of choice that ended up on the back of this baby was keyhole hangers.  According to the couple of DIY pages the internet shared, these would be strong enough to hold everything up, lay relatively flat against the wall, and be easy to install.  So easy to install that I offer you four steps to attaching your very own keyholes hangers to a shelf or other apparatus that is in need of hanging.    

Once all four extremely crucial steps have taken place, TA-DA, a shelf can be hung.

Man, taking a picture of a bathroom that has no windows with a camera without a wide angle lens is tough.  But, I did the best I could.  To make up for the quality, I've included a cat butt in the below picture.  You're welcome.  This is what our bathroom wall looked like prior to the detowel barring. 



Blurry cat butts make everything better

 Now, truth be told, I've never removed a towel bar from anything before but luckily, it ended up being crazy easy.  The one tricky part was actually removing the screws that hold the bar to its wall hanger.  The only screwdriver on hand that was small enough came from a glasses repair kit but I couldn't get a grip on it enough to turn the screw hence the appearance of the needle nose pliers in Step 1.    

Once the wall was all spackled and sanded, it was time for paint.  This was the point where I realized that we have a lot of blue walls in our house therefore creating an excess of half full paint containers that are also blue.  Thankfully though, my husband was smart enough to label the paint cans appropriately.  Yep, prepare for bathroom adventure time. 

After the agonizing wait of allowing the paint to dry (no picutres of this because seriously, you want to see a picture of drying paint?), it was time for the hanging.  Now, I was home alone during this step so I couldn't get the fella to snap a picture so I tried to recreate it on the floor.  Just imagine the below picture happening 4 1/2 feet up.

"What's up with the ruler?", you may be asking.  "Pinterest" would be my reply.  Little life hack I came across after being on Pinterest for a gabillion hours.  Take a ruler, nail a small nail through it about an inch from the bottom, and you have created the most handy tool ever for hanging things.  In this case, place the nail inside the keyhole hanger (where the screw will be going), place shelf on wall, once proper placement is found, gently press the shelf against the wall which in turn will press the nail in the ruler against the wall.  The nail will make a small mark showing exactly where the anchor and screw need to go.  I've used this ruler/nail tool a dozen times to hang pictures up in our house and it's awesome.  No more guessing or measuring needed to hang pictures up in the correct spot the first time.

My process for this portion of the project was to use the ruler hanger to mark where the left anchor and screw would go.  Once those were installed in the wall, I hung the shelf on it and using a level and my ruler tool, was able to easily mark where the anchor and screw for the right side should go.

I also added some felt cirlces to the bottom two corners of the shelf to help stop any bumping around plans this sucka may have had. 

Once everthing was said and done, our bathroom looked a little something like this.  Or exactly like this.  It is a picture afterall. 



No more linen origami.  No more straightening out haphazard towels.  NO MORE TOWEL BAR. 

Here's a nice Before/After shot of the bathroom. 

To be fair, the cat butt does add a little something extra to the Before picture

I love it.  The shelf offers space to display some cool knick-knacks which currently consist of a ceramic octopus I bought BJ for Christmas last year, a glass bottle filled with agates and sea glass, as well as another bottle filled with beach sand. My family used to go to Newport beach every summer when we were all little so I wanted to take a bit of the beach with me on our final trip.  The octopus prints are also hung a bit higher than previously which I think adds some nice scale to the walls/ceiling.

And, the most crucial point of this entire endeavor, no more towel bar......or is there....BUH BUH BUUUUUUDUUUUUHHHHHHH.