Check out this project in the Jan/Feb 2014 issue of Ladies Home Journal. Here’s a link to the online blurb.

You may recall this old ladder from earlier when I turned about 7 feet of it into a book shelf. Last week, I decided I wanted to use some of the remaining ladder to take care of a problem Christy and I have been having since we bought our old house: we don’t have enough storage space in our kitchen (or anywhere).

As you can see above, I cut the remaining ladder into three sections: Two 3-foot sections for pot racks and a 4-foot section for I’m not sure what (maybe another shelf). The ladder was really dirty, so I had to spend about two hours scraping and sanding all of the gunk until the ladder appeared mostly clean. I didn’t sand all of the patina away, but restored a lot of the original glow to the wood.

The rest of the pot rack was pretty easy to assemble: four screw hooks to bolt into studs in the ceiling, four eye bolts to screw into the ladder, 10 feet of chain cut into four sections about a foot long (there was extra), some s-hooks from a cooking specialty store (Lowe’s didn’t have them – I was surprised I couldn’t find something equivalent for cheaper at the hardware store), and a single coat of matte finish polyurethane = BOOM!

Finding the studs was a real pain. Our ceilings look like they’re drywall. They are. But that drywall is on top of the plaster, so using a stud finder was completely out of the question. I had to crawl into the attic, drill down next to a stud, measure carefully to one stud over, and hope for the best. It all worked out.

If you like what you see, contact us at oldhousecrazy@gmail.com. Thanks for reading. -Robby