The "Reclaim Your Life's Hours from the Abyss" Towel Hanger

 Yesterday I (Steve) spent several hours making a map of our house's electrical circuits in preparation for some remodeling projects. The sketch below illustrates the haphazard nature of this old house's electrical system. As I was making this map I could feel my life's hour's slowly draining into some sort of abyss. Not that this sort of thing is not fun (it's a bit of a puzzle, in fact) - it's just that one cannot do it all so.....

...the next day I decided to switch gears and grab some colorful tiles we got at an antique shop plus....

...some old barn wood that I got from a barn in NE Indiana plus...

...some old doorknobs that we got somewhere for free. The goal was to make a towel hanger for an upcoming bathroom remodel the theme of which will be "festive". 

The door knobs would be the actual hangers for the towels but the hardware first needed altered. Amazing what you can do with a vice and some hand tools (hacksaw and file):

What's the point of this? Wait for it...

The old barn siding board that I'd intended to use for the backer already had an angle cut on one end so I decided to replicate that angle on the other end. Lest ye shudder in anticipation of the use of trigonometry - fear not - a simple adjustable angle gauge suffices for a lot of things. Just get the angle you want and...

...transpose it to one you want to cut and...

...mark it, then....

...replicate the angle on your table saw and cut the darn thing (being careful to not cut your fingers off)!

The hardware from step 1 was then glued/driven into the backer board:

The door knobs were then conveniently screwed onto their original shank:

I used a couple of appropriately-sized spacers to lay out the position of tiles and then...

....applied some adhesive and then....

...affixed the tiles onto the backer board.

Does it meet the "festive" criterion?

A closer look:

Jennifer appears to indicate that festive-ness was achieved!

Getting a start on laying out some funky and festive pieces for our planned half-bath. This bathroom is going to be a riot of color with a healthy splash of simplicity!