Towels tend to be bulky; they require plenty of storage space. While you can always find quality storage at a home improvement store, DIY solutions can be just as good, cost you less and bring far more character to your bathroom than any manufactured solution.
Try out the 10 DIY towel holders ideas below.
1. The hook-and-rope solution
Eyelet hooks on your bathroom walls holding up rope may not sound like a particularly attractive way to store your towels. The secret to making the idea work is to use decorative hooks and thick rope made of natural fiber rather than the thin nylon kind.
When you space several hooks out on your bathroom walls, the support should ensure minimal sag in the rope. With the gleam of your beautiful hooks punctuating the space and the pretty sisal rope showing between your towels, your bathroom will gain plenty of personality.
2. Cute towel baskets
Clean towels in the bathroom don’t necessarily need to rest folded up on a shelf. Rolled-up towels can happily live in little wicker baskets, too. All you need are a few attractive hooks on the walls holding them up. As long as the wicker is adequately varnished, it’ll hold up to the steam in your bathroom and contribute to the ambience.
3. A repurposed stepladder
Cleverly repurposed articles are the easiest way to impress anyone who passes through your home. Not many, for instance, would recognize that a short stepladder with wide steps could make an excellent bathroom storage solution. You only need to put in a little work to make sure that the stepladder doesn’t come off looking like a cheap improvisation.
Consider painting it a soft, light shade and decorating it with a pretty, leafy fake vine. When you place rolled up towels on each step, the effect is likely to be a pretty charming one.
4. The wine rack towel holder
If you were to go shopping for a towel holder for your bathroom, you would probably pass right by the wine rack display in the store’s dining room section and never think of the possibilities. Wine racks are cheap, offer plenty of shelf space and are able to look cool in a bathroom, simply because no one expects to see them there. Each bottle-holder depresion can end up holding a towel.
5. Towel hooks on pretty polished wooden boards
You don’t necessarily need to stack all your towels in one place. You won’t mind seeing them in multiple places in your bathroom if you find an attractive storage solution like small shelving made of polished wood. The only material you’ll need to put up these shelves on your own are sections of pinewood cut to the right sizes (any home improvement store will do the job for you).
You’ll need to plan for a backboard that’s a couple feet long and two smaller sections affixed to the top, acting as shelves. The bottom of the board should hold a towel hook for an in-use towel. Once you sand and polish the wood, you can screw the pieces together and hang each new towel holder on a different wall in your bathroom.
6. Wooden crates can be surprisingly chic
When you see discarded wooden fruit crates at a farmer’s market or a supermarket, they might never get you thinking of towel holders. Yet, if you know how to make them work, they can easily turn into charming little bathroom storage devices.
All you need to do is to get four or five crates, sand them down well, stain them in bright, cheerful colors and stack them on their sides in your bathroom to hold your pretty, fluffy, rolled-up towels.
7. Being more fancy with your crates
If simply stacking crates on your bathroom floor doesn’t seem classy enough, you have the option of getting beautiful, metal shelving brackets on your bathroom walls and placing your crates on them. With this approach, though, bright primary colors wouldn’t work very well. You’d be much better off staining the wood a sober, deep brown.
8. Wonderful wine barrels
Both eBay and dedicated barrel stores online sell empty wine/whiskey barrels. These can make for practical, affordable and attractive bathroom storage. You can use them not just for your towel’s but for everything that you have in the bathroom toilet paper, reading material, toiletries and so on.
You simply need to slice each barrel across in three and hang each section on the wall. Your bathroom will gain in great storage right away and in lots of personality.
9. Consider plant pots
Plant pots are large enough to hold towels or anything else that you may need to store in your bathroom. The question is: where do you put them? Luckily, home improvement stores sell a variety of wall holders for plant pots. If you intersperse the towel-holder pots with ones that contain real plants, you’ll achieve a pretty overall effect.
10. The headboard towel holder idea
The headboard of an old crib can make for a great base for towel holder. You can find headboards at any yard sale or flea market. Once you have one beautifully sanded, polished and painted, a few decorative hooks screwed in will hold all the towels you need.
The aim with these DIY towel holder ideas is to decorate your bathroom in a way that truly reflects who you are. Only the DIY approach can help you here.
