Like Watching Paint Dry

The coat hook whozits is finished. See?

And it wasn't like watching paint dry. It was, in large part, actually watching paint dry. Right now it has hats and jackets on it, instead of the hats and jackets being placed on top of the file cabinet, so that's good. It was easy too.

First you need a piece of scrap wood given to you by your husband's co-worker who finished building a house and heard you might like some good scrap wood and didn't see why the wood should go into the garbage (also the source wood for the shelves in the storage closet).

Stain the scrap wood with Minwax rosewood stain that surprisingly is still good after 7 years sitting in one box after another. Many of my unused paints and stains survived close to a decade of neglect. The deciding factors: how well the container it came is was designed and how well I closed said containers.

Wax areas that you want a lot of wear. Here I did it mostly around the edges and one spot in the middle. If I had to do it over again, I'da made these spots wider and bigger. How'd I wax these areas? You may be wondering. Well wonder no more! I have some left over candle wax. I shaved some flakes off it, but the flakes in a used tealight tin and lit it from the bottom with a lighter. I used an old t-shirt to rub the wax on.

First I spread on some newly bought white crackle medium. I have 7 year old spray can white crackle that still works but spray on crackle would have been to thin. After the spreading (and the drying. Don't forget to watch it dry for hours after each step!) I sanded it by hand. At first.
Just because I had to wait hours and hours and hours for this piece of scrap to dry between each step didn't mean I had to spend hours and hours sanding it when I have an electric hand sander. After spending a half an hour with sandpaper, I got all the sanding done in 2 seconds with the electric sander.

Decoupaged the bottom and stenciled the top. The stencil is another old, old project leftover. See, I'm not a hoarder. I DO have uses for these old, used things.

The most expensive part of this project, the hooks and knobs. The knobs were a buck and the hooks a buck fifty each. The screws the hooks came with are too long for the scrap wood and I accidentally screwed the rack to the table. Good thing I decided to climb the TV mountain and use the power tools in the craft room. It would have been awful if I had screwed it to the bed.


Do not ask me how to hang it on the wall. The system I used-- mirror wire around two screws in the back hung over screws already in the wall when we bought the house- may not work for everyone. Plus, mirror wire may be strong, but it's not particularly stable.

As for the TV, the reason it still in the room and not at the bottom of the stairs in pieces is because hubby came in late last night and promised it will be out of the room this evening.

This is not for sale at either my Artfire Studio or my Etsy Shop.