A couple of years ago my tiny little 9.5’ x 9.5’ guest room/craft room became overloaded when several very large printers that I had been keeping at the office got jammed in there. And with the printers in there, all of the consumables that go with them such as reams of tabloid paper, color laser cartridges, ink jet cartridges, rolls of E size paper, and many rolls of vinyl also got dumped in there, leaving no room at all.

To free up some floor space and make it possible to walk around and open the futon into a bed again, I decided that I needed to get the rolls of vinyl up off the floor. After looking around online for vinyl storage ideas I decided to build a rack which I could mount above the closet door which would otherwise be unused space.

The design of the rack is pretty simple. It’s a 5’ x 1’ sheet of 1/2” plywood, with lots of large pegs that the vinyl rolls would slide over. Most of the pegs were made to hold 3” rolls. Several though have a narrow finger which can hold either a 3” roll or a narrower 1.5” roll. I don’t have very many of the narrow rolls so I didn’t make too many of those pegs.

Each peg is also made out of 1/2” plywood. It was taking too long to sand the ends of each one round so I made a quick & dirty jig out of some scraps and toggle clamps and then used the router to trim each one to the same shape. After they were all shaped I rounded over the edges with a 1/16” radius bit, and then cut them down to approximately 6” long which is more than enough to hold up a 24” roll.

When I went to mount the rack I wasn’t sure how I was going to hold it up while I put the first couple of screws in. I started to look for something really tall that I could prop it up on when I realized that there were a couple of sets of doors that were already right there that I could rest the rack on!

I was expecting to have to hunt for studs but it turned out the header over the closet was solid. The stud finder had insisted it was but I didn’t believe it until I put the first two screws in.