We described in a previous post a wooden shoe rack made out of pinewood. We also built a pine wood coat rack to match the shoe rack. It was built in the same minimalist style, still fulfilling all the requirements for a small apartment: it has a shelf for storing various useful things in the apartment entrance and enough wooden hooks.
For this coat rack I used a 2 cm thick pine wood panel with the same dimensions as the entryway bench: 70 cm long and 32 cm deep. The panel that I used was not bought, it was made by us in the workshop. The reason is simple: it is much more resistant (the bending risk is reduced because the planks used for it are wider than those used for the commercial panels), the panel being floated.
Although the majority of the coat racks which are made in this style (with spaced planks) are made from same size planks, I have chosen different length and width planks, which pass through the shelf. So, I used 3 planks at 9.5 cm wide (different lengths:120 cm, 110 cm and 92 cm) and 4 planks at 5 cm wide (different lengths: 43 cm, 59 cm, 67 cm and 93 cm), all 2 cm thick. After picking their size and cutting them accordingly, I sanded them on the visible face (I did not sand on the back so that they could lay flat on the wall – otherwise the edges could have become slightly rounded) and I beveled their edges.
In order to easily install the wooden coat rack, I cut the shelf according to the width of the planks used, leaving equal spaces between the 7 planks and the edges of the shelf.
The calculations are relatively simple: 70 cm (length of the panel) – 4 * 5 cm (width of the narrow planks) – 3 * 9.5 cm (width of the wide planks) = 21.5 cm.
The length obtained should be divided into the 6 spaces between the planks and the distances to the edges of the shelf. I got the conclusion that I should keep 3 cm between the planks and 1.75 cm from the edges of the shelf.
In depth, I cut out the 2 cm (shelf thickness) from the edge. I cut perpendicular with the jigsaw.
The cut, parallel with the edge of the shelf, was done with the router to make sure that the planks are placed perpendicularly on the shelf(there is a risk of bending the blade of the jigsaw and ending with each cut at a different angle).
After the cuts, I covered the small defects with wood putty, I sanded the surfaces of the panel and beveled all the edges, except the edge that had to sit on the wall.
I made the hooks, 7 in number, from a round beech rod of 14 mm diameter. I cut them at 6 cm long using the method described in the article about safely and precisely cut a round bar.
I sanded the end of the hooks, and I beveled the sharp edges.
I marked the places where the wooden hooks had to be fitted, and I drilled the oblique holes using a fixed drill with a stand. There was no need to use the method presented in the article about oblique holes with a hand drill, because the pieces were small enough and light enough to hold them tight on the table of the drill.
I put each hanger in its position (I used glue to make sure they won’t start to move, although the holes were sufficiently precise that the small beech rods were forced into their holes).
All the pieces were stained, separately, with water-based walnut stain, protected with primer and transparent matte water-based varnish.
Before installing it on the wall, I screwed the planks into the cutouts made in the shelf. For gripping to the wall, I drilled some holes in the three wide planks. I used theese holes to screw the whole coat rack to the wall. In fact, only the two end planks were drilled, because in the third plank the hole hit the rebar in the concrete wall, which prevented me from drilling a long enough hole in the wall.
