Spoon coat rack

Way back when the weather started turning cold -- probably in October or November -- my host daughter, Y, asked if we could put some hooks up in her bedroom for her coats.  The request wasn't urgent, she assured me.

All winter long, I've kept meaning to swing by the far-away Habitat Restore to find some used hooks, but with one thing and another, I never made it there.  Y had long forgotten her request, I discovered eventually, but I didn't forget; it kept niggling in the back of my head.

And then, surfing around on the web, I e-stumbled across a nifty idea.  Fifteen minutes later, I had a coat rack.  Um, of sorts.

I found an old painted board in the garage and sanded it down; it has a nifty distressed look.  We also have an unreasonably large stash of thrift-store-purchased spoons that we use when we have parties; we keep these around so we don't have to resort to disposables.  I co-opted 8 of them for this project.  I bent the spoons around a fat dowel rod (I pressed the dowel rod down on the handle end of the spoon and then lifted the spoon around the rod).

I don't have a drill bit that goes through metal, I discovered, so I couldn't screw the spoons directly to the wood.  Sigh.  I'm working on borrowing such a drill bit from a friend right now.  In the meanwhile, I banged a nail partway into the wood and then bent the nail with pliers and hammers around the neck of the spoon.  This won't hold hugely heavy loads, but it ought to serve the purpose for jackets until we can get the metal drill bit to do its thing. 

I've seen much more elegant versions of this on the web of course, but I have to say that for a 15-minute project, this quick hack is pretty cool.  Y loves the look of the spoon hangers, and she's currently looking for the perfect spot in her room to put it up.   

Huzzah for cool web ideas!