Making A Coat & Shoe Racks

I salvaged some pieces of oak veneered MDF with solid oak trim, these were old book shelves that were stored in a cold, damp building and they started to go mouldy so were going to be thrown away.  

I had hoped that the mould would clean or sand off, however after trying I realised that the mould goes right through the veneer and in to the MDF, so I decided to cut off the mouldy parts and make use of what was left.  

My house has a small entrance porch, and I cut some shelves to the width of the alcove in the porch and fitted them to an adjustable shelving system with brackets to make use of the shelves as a shoe rack.

I wanted to make a matching coat rack with a shelf at the top, to sit above the shoe rack on the wall. 

I started by cutting the top shelf to length on the mitre saw and then ripped it to the desired depth on the tablesaw.

I then used the offcut to make the back piece of the coat rack that would have hooks on for the coats.

Then I cut some corner supports that braced the two pieces together at each end.

The hooks for the coat rack came from the salvaged hat and coat stands that I've been using in a lot of recent projects.  I have a lot of these hooks so if anyone needs some, get in touch as it'd be great to get them put to some sort of use!

I assembled the rack with glue and screws from the back and secured the top shelf with glue and brad nails.

Then I cut some strips of oak and glued and taped them on to the MDF edges so that they would not be visible.

Finally, I install the rack to the wall.