Soon after we moved into La Maison du Talley in Seattle, my lovely bride decided that “we” needed a place to hang coats by the front door. I looked a little at coat racks and hall trees in the shops close to the house, but I just couldn’t stomach paying $250-300 for a semi-crappy coat rack that was the wrong color or wood for our house. I had one of those “light bulb” moments and decided to build one for us. Normally, I would have cut the raised panels (I tried to convince Stamps-With-Foot to let me do linen-fold panels) and added a little fancy trip work, but as I was recovering from shoulder surgery (#4), I decided to go with the re-use route. Second Use is a used hardware and reclaimed building material store in Seattle that I frequent and I cruised over for a used fir 6-panel door. Right away, I found the perfect one that set me back a whole $30. While pushing the cart loaded with the door to the front, I found a couple of cast off cabinet doors, a few odd sections of trim, and a bundle of old tongue & groove fir flooring. A plan formed in my little head…

I cut two feet from the top of the door, then flipped it over. I built a bench and shoe rack from the cabinet doors (raised panels turned in to match the adjacent hutch and the flat panel cabinets in the rest of the house) and attached it to what became the bottom of the door/hall tree. I ringed the top with a flooring plank, tongue down, and then applied some 100 year old left over fir crown molding on the top. The whole thing was sanded down and stained a deep red mahogany and finished off with 3 coats of exterior grade polyurethane.

For the hooks, I sourced a set of coat and helmet hooks from an old Seattle firehouse and small round dog leash hooks from Rejuvenation Hardware. When all was said and done, this was the very first project finished for our home in Seattle, I spent a total of $94, and I wrote a little love note to Stamps-With-Foot on the top of it. My little wife was giddy when I brought it into the house and she raved to friends for weeks about handy and awesome her husband was – made me puff out my chest like a Banty rooster.

If I did this again, the only thing I would change would be to make the shoe shelves movable as they are about 1/4″ too narrow for my running shoes, but perfect for her shoes, which I guess is the most important feature.