Upcycled hat rack...

We have a beautiful vertical Amish coat rack that my mom gave us several years ago. I love it as it's made from rustic wood with a smooth finish. It holds quite a few coats and I often have to trim down the contents to just the jackets/sweatshirts/coats that are currently in circulation. One of the things that doesn't work well about it is if you hang a hat (like a baseball hat) on it, coats don't hang well over them and hats don't hang well over the coats. We needed a hat rack.

Recently we decided to do something about the hat issue and bought a hard piece of red oak. It was about 4'x3"x3/4" in size. We also bought some black faux wrought iron hooks for it.

My husband had gotten a router last summer and hadn't had time to play with it so he had fun routing the edge into a classic finish and then stained and finished it with polyurethane.

During the days after that it was drying, I remembered that last fall we had bought a bag full of maple sugaring taps at an antique store in VT and wondered if we could make those work as the hooks.

So A spent the afternoon puttering in his shop yesterday (he doesn't have a lot of time off so he doesn't get to his shop often enough) and figured out how to secure the taps as hooks.

Below is what it looks like. It hangs along the angle of the stairs (our makeshift mudroom) and looks great!