DIY Nail Polish Rack Tutorial. Sort of.

So with an addiction to subscription boxes, comes addictions to related Facebook groups, comes side sales and swaps of anything you could possibly think of. My vice? Nail polish. I don't have a lot, but I am a Julep Maven and that translates to me receiving nail polish every month. What do you do with all your nail polish when you've already taken over most of the bathroom storage for all of your other "woman crap" as men love to refer to it as? Well. You Google. You Youtube. You Pinterest. I ended up finding a great tutorial here from The Polished Fox. She gives a great explanation on the how to's with photos of the whole process. Bare with me because I have NEVER in my life written a tutorial for anyone for anything. I can barely share my recipes properly without throwing a profanity in there somewhere.

True to myself, I am unconventional and I rarely follow instructions perfectly, so I did NOT take photos of the "during" process. I will however attempt to give a brief overview as best I can on how to make one of these:

Its not perfect, but it is an original piece hand painted by myself, and I am very happy with the end result. Most everyone either uses colored foam board, or decorative duct tape or fabric to "fancy up" their polish racks, but I took the more painterly approach was too lazy to do my own shopping and didn't want my husband picking out my fancy duct tape.

I started off with 3 foam boards ($1.25 each) from Dollarama. Box cutter, pen, ruler, hot glue gun, glue sticks (you'll need about 4-5), and paint/foam brush (or get funky and use duct tape, I wont judge you.)

The first foam board, I marked off at every 5 inches and drew a line across. Those lines will be where you glue your shelves on. You end up drawing 4 lines, plus the top and bottoms, for a total of 6 shelves in the end.

The second foam board was the bulk of the work, because that's the one that you use to cut out the shelves, and the shelf borders. So keeping your foam board in the same portrait position, you need to mark off six lines 2 inches apart. Your shelves will be 2 inches wide. If you want bigger, hell's bells, go bigger! Just kidding. Do as I say or be gone with yourself. On the same board, you'll need to mark off another six lines that are 1 inch apart. I'm not going to lie, I think I would have preferred making them 2 inches wide, because I find they look a bit flimsy when you look at the facade in my photo. But I guess they're O.k. Use your judgement based on my photo.

The third foam board gets vertical lines drawn into it to make the sides of your rack. (Hey, Nice Rack!) Now here's where you need to do as I say, and not as I do. MY rack has 2.5 inch wide sides. IT DON'T LOOK RIGHT (said in my best redneck voice). If you go a titch smaller, like 2.25 inches wide, it'll be perfect.

The next step was to cut out all these shelves and borders and sides and plug in your hot glue gun. Believe me when I say, use your ruler to help keep your box cutter/exact-o straight. Otherwise you'll end up with on one of those "Nailed It" memes and you'll never live it down. Once I cut them all out, I got to painting. In hindsight, this is where I should have got up and walked around a bit before starting because at this point my hips and knees were on fire and I could no longer feel my ass. I have this major problem with sitting "Indian style" about 14 hrs per day no matter where I am sitting, be it on the couch, the bed, the floor, my office chair (ya i can still pull it off, go me), you name it. The only time I'm not sitting like that is when I'm in the bathroom. Retelling this reminds me of that e-mail I got a few years back about the girl who tried a home waxing kit for the first time. But that's a horse of a different color. Anyways.

I really like the way mine came out, with the purple and black on white, and it will look good in my bedroom when my husband finally gets sick of my nagging and hangs it on the wall for me in about 6-8 months hangs it on the wall for me. It'll match our my purple and zebra print theme we I have going on.

Once that's done its time to glue these bitches together. There really isn't anything that I can say here because if you've made it this far, you're intelligent enough to figure out how they all piece together. So get to gluing!!!

Let your rack set for about 15-20 minutes after gluing together to make sure that all the glue is cooled off and hardened and that your rack is holding together properly. Fix up any unstuck edges with more hot glue before you decide to move it around, or hang it on the wall, or fill it with polish to take a pic and post on every social media site to draw attention to yourself like I did. Admit it. My rack is AWESOME.

You should be able to get about 15 polishes per shelf, times 6 shelves comes out to... a lot of polish depending on the brand of your polish bottles and whether or not you're a mini junkie. Now go forth, and DIY!