Mini project - coat hooks

Since our home renovation course ended last week and Georges is out of town visiting his dad, today was the first Saturday that I didn't have anything to do at all, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to work on a mini home improvement project by myself.

We had a coat rack in the hallway that we'd bump into or get caught on occasionally, causing everything to come crashing down. I decided to replace it with a series of coat hooks.

I bought two kits, each containing coat hooks pre-mounted on a board with the necessary hardware to install it, so all I had to do was drill holes into the wall, hammer in the anchors, then screw the boards in. It sounds so simple and straight-forward, but of course it wasn't!

The problem was that the wall is made of plaster on brick. I bought a mortar drill bit (labelled as 1 in the photo) and drilled the holes just fine. The problem came when I tried to use the anchors that came with the kit. They had two stupid little wings on the sides (2), preventing the anchor from entering the hole and causing it to get all crushed when I tried to hammer it in (3). I tried a different anchor, but it was too small for the hole I had drilled, so it just fell out when I screwed the board into it. When I tried to remove one of the screws from the blue anchor, it broke (4)! So, I decided to give up on the screws from the kit and use totally different ones with slightly bigger anchors (5), which held on well.


BUT, the story does not end there...

Unfortunately, I used my drill to tighten the screws, so I couldn't feel when it was just tight enough, and I ended up cracking the plaster in one of the holes, and the whole board came loose. That resulted in me having to remove the board, drill new holes and reinstall the board. Luckily, the last set of holes I drilled worked and I finally got everything installed securely (by hand, using a screwdriver) without ruining the entire wall. There are a few holes that I'll have to fix, but that's for another time!

Here are the before and after photos:



And here's how the hallway looks with all the coats hung up (it actually looks kind of messy when you look at it head-on -- sigh!):



In total, the project cost me about $50 in materials, plus 2 hours of my time.

Overall, I'm happy with the end result and I'm considering installing one more row of hooks in the foyer!