Sunday 1 April 2012

DIY: Nail Polish Rack

After a stressful weekend,  I decided to calm down by making something. Often, the concentration and attention I give to objects that I craft myself help me to release any excess stress I have. Key word = excess! There's always a baseline of stress I can handle, but when I exceed that, something needs to be done!

So I actually explored around my room and YouTube to figure out what to make. I realized that I needed to organize my nail polish in a better way, so I found a video on YouTube by Beautybymoi who made her own nail polish rack entirely from scratch. Needless to say, I grabbed my keys, headed to my car (found a nasty surprise = some neighborhood idiots had slashed my tires), then asked my mom for a ride instead. Next stop: Micheal's!

I bought some spray paint at Micheal's, and after looking at their price for 1 foam board, we practically ran out to good old Dollarama. There I bought 3 foam boards that came to a total that was less than 1 foam board from Micheal's (by the way, the price at Micheal's was $3.99).

So I got home, and got to work. Here's what I used:  
  1. 1 foam board (I used a 20in x 30in board)
  2. A ruler capable of measuring 12 inches
  3. An Exact-o-knife
  4. A level surface to work on
  5. Thick cardboard to protect your surface when cutting or spray painting
  6. A pencil
  7. A hot glue gun ( + glue sticks, of course)
Alright! Let's get to it!

Mark out all dimensions for all the pieces with the pencil on the foam board. Since I was trying out Beautybymoi's idea, I used her exact dimensions. Below are the dimensions for all the pieces:
  • Base (2 pieces each of): 12in x 6in
  • Side: 7in x 7in square
  • Tier 1: 12in x 4.5in
  • Tier 2: 12in x 3in
  • Tier 3: 12in x 1.5in
  • Legs (6 pieces each of): 12 in x 1in......each tier will be supported by 2 legs
  • Front piece: 12 3/8in x 7/8in 
Tip: Mark each piece one after the next. Keep the 12in dimension running along the shorter side of the foam board. This way you can fit more pieces along the longer side.
This picture doesn't do justice to how I arranged my pieces but here's a description of the arrangement from bottom (20 in dimension) to top (30 in dimension),starting on the left-most side:
2 base pieces, Tier 3, Tier 2, Tier 1, 6 legs, Front piece
On the right most side, I marked the side square piece


Cut the pieces out with an Exact-o-knife, using the ruler as a guide to keeping the cuts straight.

This is what the pieces looked like after they had been all cut out. Not shown here is that I cut the square side-piece into 2 triangular pieces by cutting a diagonal line through the middle of the square. After this, you end up with 2 side pieces that are triangular-shaped.
Glue gun the 2 bases so that they are at 90 degrees with each other:

Glue one side piece on top;then glue gun the other side piece on the bottom:











Trim off the corners of the excess side pieces that extend past the edges. This now completes the frame of the rack:

Glue two legs onto each tier piece like so:
  
Here's how all 3 tiers with legs attached looked like:
Turn the frame over so that it's resting on one of base pieces. Squeeze glue onto the inner corner where the two bases meet and place the largest tier piece onto that spot. After, repeat the step by squeezing glue between the base piece and the tier piece, and placing the next sized tier onto that spot like so:

This is what it should look like after all 3 tiers are placed into position:


























Add glue onto the front piece and attach to the bottom of the rack. This will prevent the nail polish at the bottom from falling out:


























Finis!! Alright, now that all the technical parts have been finished, you can now spray paint and decorate to your heart's desire: I spray painted mine yellow and even made a quick version of another rack (without the tiers) to store some of my make-up palettes and lip products:
Here's how it looked like with the items in. The nail polish rack fit 41 of my nail polishes. I tried to fit 42, but had no luck. *sigh*














Hope you try it out. Let me know how it works for ya!

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