Should You Build the PVC Towel Rack?
Should You Build a PVC Towel Rack?
There’s a fun PVC towel rack that’s been making the rounds on Pinterest boards lately. It’s a rack offered by TowelMaid.com. You can buy the rack or the plans. For this project, we purchased the plans and decided to put the rack together ourselves. Read on to see the results.
We were excited about the PVC rack because we’ve made other projects with PVC pipe and found it to be very economical. So we read the plans and headed down to Home Depot to pick up our supplies. Although the plans called for “Furniture Grade PVC”, we had never heard of that type of pipe and assumed that the PVC pipe carried by most home improvement stores would work for our rack. The first thing we noticed is that some of the fittings required on the plans are not available at home improvement stores because they aren’t standard size sprinkler fittings.
We moved our search for the PVC fittings online. We tried several places, but could only find the fittings on Ebay where we were introduced to Furniture Grade PVC. They do make PVC designed just for making furniture. It comes in a variety of colors and we loved looking at all the possibilities. However, this PVC is much more expensive than the kind you find at the home improvement stores. We priced out the parts for the towel rack by TowelMaid in the basic white pipe, for a grand total of $102.79.
We were attracted to the project because we viewed it as cheaper towel and pool accessories storage than a large outdoor storage box, and so we decided not to build the project due to the cost. Don’t get us wrong–it’s still a cool project and the plans were easy to follow, it just didn’t fit our budget.
