Finishing Touches

I don't know about you, but about every time I do laundry, I hang a good deal of my clothes to dry. In our current place, the drying spot is the shower rod in the bathroom. In the grand scheme of things, the shower rod is a pretty good solution, but it has its draw-backs, especially since we use that shower pretty frequently. Really, I've always thought of the shower rod as a (mostly) temporary situation, pending a better option coming to me. Thanks to Pinterest and such, I've finally decided on a Laundry Ladder for the laundry room.

Not having an old wooden ladder on hand, I toyed with the idea of building my own; there are several online tutorials. However, I don't really have the tools to do it well and I needed this ladder to stay together and look good enough to display (even if just in my laundry room).  So, I turned to Craigslist. You can find anything on Craigslist. And I did!

This ladder was definitely old and a bit beat up. The paint was all flaking off and so (worried about the possibility of lead flakes in my clothes) I decided it would need a sanding and a fresh coat of paint.

Next came figuring out how to hang this thing.

Never having tackled a project like this before, I was a little nervous about the hanging of the ladder. When I feel uncertain about steps in my projects, I tend to put them off. The ladder sat around in my garage for a couple months before I finally decided it was too silly to put it off any longer. So, I forged onward.

My laundry room is fairly small, so I wanted this ladder to at least not *seem* like it was taking up a ton of space. White is a good color for that, and I had some white paint on hand. So, white it would be. First, I pulled out some left-over sprat paint and gave the hanging hardware a makeover:

Next, on to the ladder itself:

Once the paint on the ladder was set, it was just a matter of putting it all together. Then, I strung it up from the ceiling:

Now all I need is some wet laundry!