Racking my brains

A couple months ago, Lori bought some small metal towel racks to hang in the bathroom. I installed them somewhat easily, though I was lucky that one simply fit into the old bracket. With the boys back in swimming, she wanted a couple more of the small towel pegs in our bathroom to hang wet suits and towels from. I found the same racks at Home Depot, bought four of them, and planned to add them to the wall last Saturday. Easy, right?

Wrong. What followed were of the most frustrating, wasted hours of my life. And at the end of it, just one peg was added to the wall.

The racks are simple to install. Bore the plastic brackets (already equipped with a spiky tip for easy boring) into the dry wall, insert the screws through the metal mounting bracket that hold the towel rack, screw in the screws to secure the bracket, add the rack, tighten that up with the included Allen wrench and your done. I did this a couple months ago, so my biggest concern was just keeping them even on the wall.

After measuring and hopefully getting my marks even I bore the plastic wall brackets in for the first rack. But as I was tightening the metal screws, I ran into a problem: The screws stopped turning. Or, they turned the plastic brackets along for the ride, thus boring the brackets further (and wider) into the dry wall. For some reason, the screws that accompanied the towel rack were too big/wide for the brackets. Thus, they wouldn't keep the wall bracket tight with the wall. My frustration was mounting at the same time the towel rack wasn't mounting.

I managed to jury-rig the first rack by placing a small piece of cardboard behind the wall bracket, then getting the screws to tighten to at least there. The rack wasn't on as tight as I wanted, but it was functional. I moved to the second rack, thinking maybe the first one simply came with the wrong parts. Unfortunately, I was wrong, resulting in another hour of torturous, non-productive home improvement. This time, the rack wouldn't stay on the bracket. I thought I had it, but eventually, the rack fell off the wall; the holes the plastic brackets bored were now too wide. Lori found it and didn't even tell me what happened, possibly thinking I might take a hammer to the whole dry wall.

I waited until today to tackle the towel racks again. I had an extra parts set from last time (remember, I previously used an old wall mount for one of the new racks) and thought that this couldn't be defective, too. I turned the wall bracket at a 90-degree angle to get two new holes but cover up the old ones. With optimism, the work began. Ten minutes later, pessimism set in. The screws weren't going into the plastic brackets again. I resorted to pliers to try to turn these pesky screws, only to have one break. After opening one of the remaining towel racks and seeing the same size screws and brackets, I threw everything into the Home Depot plastic bag and returned to the store.

Thankfully, Home Depot took pity on me. Perhaps I wasn't the first frustrated customer who dealt with this problem on this particular brand of towel rack. Free of charge, the store gave me new, much better designed wall brackets that would fit the existing holes and not turn when I turned the screw. Not wanting to push my luck, I got a refund for the remaining towel racks, then went home to finish the job I started last week.

Much to my happiness, the new brackets worked perfectly. I even took the shaky brackets off the first towel rack (the one I managed to keep on the wall) and replaced them with the better designed parts. Two new towel racks adorn our bathroom wall, ready for wet swim trunks and drying beach towels.

I suck at home projects, but I figured I could handle a simple towel rack. After getting the job done today, I don't feel as stupid as I felt last week. It wasn't anything I did wrong, just a poorly designed rack. I'm not sure if we'll add two more racks as planned, but if we do, I may pre-emptively by better wall brackets. But in the meantime, I can't get over one detail: How did I ever get the last towel racks -- same brand and parts -- to stay in the wall so expertly last time when this time was such a debacle? I'm not about to take apart those racks to find out.

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