I was tired of the old, busted-up, and painted-over towel hooks that we inherited with the apartment, so I finally did something about it. I built this sweet little mountain range towel hook this afternoon from scraps. It’s pretty simple, so I’m not going to go into too much detail, but if you have any questions or want further details, just send me a message.
You’ll need to start with two reasonably thin boards and it will help if the tones of wood differ a fair bit – otherwise, you’ll probably want to add a little dark stain on the board you use for the mountains to help them stand apart. I find stain quite finicky, so I definitely choose two types of wood. I planed each board and set the miter on my table saw to 30 degrees, flipping the piece after every cut to make 5 equilateral triangles.
Sand these little future-mountains on all sides till they’re as smooth as you can stand (this way it won’t catch on your towels), wipe them off with a good tack cloth, and then give them a few light coats of polyurethane – this is going up in the bathroom, so it needs some protection against moisture. Treat your backing board the same way – sand and finish. We’re finishing things while they are flat – normally we’d finish the piece after assembly, but if we did that, in this case, we’d have all sorts of drips on our mountain range towel hook.
I used an old broom handle for the posts and cut them at several lengths to create a bit of variance and depth. Turns out old broom handles are 7/8ths wide and the holes made by my 7/8ths Forstner bit made a nice dry fit drilling to about half depth. I’d recommend testing a dry fit on some scrap before you go in for a glue-up on your actual work pieces.
Add some mounting holes. Use a countersink bit, and then drill the pilot hole. If you do it in the other order your countersink hole will wobble as the bit’s edge catches in the pilot hole.
Fit everything together with glue and ensure that the mountain bottoms are flat. Make a long strip of zig-zag painter’s tape – a metal ruler and x-acto blade are helpful for this. I recommend simple perpendicular lines. Use these to mask off the snow-capped peaks and then paint with white paint. I used a thick house paint with built in primer – mainly because it was thick.
Use your mounting holes to get this sucker up on the wall!