COST: $25
EFFORT: 2 out of 5
RESULTS: 5 out of 5
Our son recently lost one of his drumsticks and went into a panic. Our daughter was the one who found it ... in his band bag, exactly where it should have been.
Oh man. He is a sweet, smart boy with many excellent qualities, but finding things that are right in front of him is not one of them.
Now that he’s nearing the end of Grade 3, he has important things to keep track of — his band bag, taekwondo sparring gear, homework, etc. Since his room is an ode to all things Lego, it made sense to create Lego-themed hooks for his wall.
All we needed for the project was a one-and-one-quarter-inch dowel — we bought a six-foot one and have a lot leftover — an eight-foot 2x4 board and a few hooks.
The first step is using a mitre saw to chop some of your dowel into half-inch slices. I asked my handy husband to do this part because I always get nervous little pieces are going to zing out — which does happen sometimes. For this project, I needed 30 slices to make 30 Lego “bumps.”
After the slices were cut and sanded, I took over the saw and cut my bricks. Since a 2x4 is actually only three-and-a-half inches wide — one of those weird woodworking secrets it took me a while to learn — I cut three three-and-a-half-inch pieces so my square bricks were perfect squares.
Then I cut three five-and-a-half-inch pieces to make rectangular bricks, which I think are called 2x3s in the Lego world because they have two rows of three bumps. I also cut a 24.5 inch piece of 2x4 that I’d use as as base.
I dabbed a bit of wood glue on the bottom of the wood slices to secure them to the bricks, and then tacked each one down with my finish nailer. They were so cute already — like real Lego bricks, only wood!
Later on, I painted them in three different classic Lego colours — red, yellow and blue — using tester pots of Benjamin Moore paint. (I picked the most hilariously basic paint shades, too — Red (2000-10), Yellow 2022-10 and Blue 2066-10.) I also painted the base plain white.
Once everything was dry, I played around with different arrangements — tilting the Lego bricks, angling them, stacking them — but ended up liking how they looked in a straight line. I screwed each brick into the base, one after another, and then screwed my four black hooks below them, evenly spaced.
After brushing on a bit of paint to disguise the screws, the hooks were ready to hang. I didn’t even need to use wall anchors, since my handy husband helped me locate the studs. (He even tolerated my tired joke of saying “Beep! Found one!” and pointing at him.)
The new hooks look great up on the wall, and they’ve already proved their usefulness by keeping our son’s percussion bag and taekwondo sparring gear up off the floor. It remains to be seen if our son will actually remember to grab either of those items when he passes by the hooks, of course.
