{Tutorial} The Big Giant Ladder

A few months back, I was at Anthropology with my husband, and I noticed that they had all of their quilts hanging from this huge ladder type rack. I loved it so much and told Sean right away that we were making it, like NOW!

Too bad it took almost 6 months to actually find time to make it, but it’s now done, and I am so happy with how it turned out.

You will start with two 2×8 boards and a 8 foot dowel.

The very first thing you need to do is mark where you want your cross dowels to be. We wanted our first one to be higher off the floor so that the kids wouldn’t try to climb it. But who are we kidding, The Little Man still tries all the time!

One you mark your spots, you will use a hole saw to drill your holes just large enough to fit your dowel. We don’t have a cool work area in our little rental duplex, so we were doing this in our carport, and we used one of the 2×8’s to hold the other slightly off the ground.

Then I placed my helpful self on the opposite end of the board to keep it from moving. See, I helped!

Once the holes were cut, we then turned the board on it’s side and countersunk a pre-drilled hole into the side so we could keep the dowel in the hole and prevent it from turning.

We wanted our “ladder” to be 2 feet wide, so we cut our dowel every 24 inches.

We then placed the dowel into the hole. We predrilled another hole, this time into the dowel, to prevent splitting. Then placed screws in place on both sides!

The “ladder” was sure looking awesome, but we needed it to match some of our house. So we used 3 coats of wood stain to give it a more finished look!

This was after just one coat. We realized that the wood wasn’t taking it in some places, so we needed to give it a good sand to open the pores for the stain.

I’m in love with how it turned out. It’s so convenient to have our MASIVE pile of blankets off the ground and all in one designer place!