My wife has amassed quite the collection of essentials oils. The only problem is they just ended up in a cigar box on our vanity, and scattered throughout the house! We had some free wall space, so I decided to make a hanging rack for them.

Step 1: Gather Tools and Materials

This project can be made with two sets of materials, depending on your experience and equipment. I built it out of rough 4/4 red oak, but you could easily go to the lumber section of most big box stores and buy ready to go lumber that just needs to be cut to length and assembled. You would need:

1" x 2" x 6' (1)
1/2" x 2" x 6' (2)
1/4" x 1/4" x 6' (2)

If you go that route the only tools you'll need would be:

Saw to crosscut the material to length
Fastening method (glue, clamps, nails, screws - your preference)
Sander
Finish

If you go the rough lumber route you're going to need more equipment.

Step 2: Mill the Rough Lumber

Like working with any rough lumber, I just take my stock to the jointer, planer, and table saw to bring it to 1x S4S (surfaced all four sides and 3/4" thick).

Once it is S4S, I rip it into 1.5" strips to create 1"x2" strips.

Step 3: Establish a Ledge on the Shelf

First step is cutting the pieces to length, I do this at my miter saw station.

If you're working with purchased lumber then to do this you just need to glue or nail the 1/4"x1/4" stock onto the front of the 1/2"x2" stock to create a lip that will prevent the oil bottles from getting easily knocked off.

If you're going the rough lumber way there are basic ways. You can cut out the waste on the table saw to create the lip. Or, you can have some fun at your jointer if it's able to cut rabbets. That's the direction I went just to experiment with the technique. Bring the fence most of the way forward and lower the infeed table after each pass until the lip is large enough.

Step 4: Assemble the Rack

Assembly is very straight forward. I used glue and brad nails, but you could just glue and clamps, nails, screws.. whatever suits you.

Just attach the shelves to the sides using whatever fastening method you prefer. Spacing is pretty important though. On this project there is a ledge the bottle must be lifted over, when that is the case I like the space between the top of the object and the shelf above it to be twice the height of the ledge.

In this case, the ledge is 1/4", so I want 1/2" of clearance between the top of the bottles and the next shelf. So during spacing I take the height of the bottles that will be on that shelf and add 1/2".

Step 5: Finishing

I used a nail punch to counter-sink the nails before using wood filler to cover the nails heads to get a cleaner look. Then I sand everything up to 220 with my random orbit sander before applying two coats of a wood oil finish.

Some people say it's not necessary if you use an oil finish, but I still always wet the wood with water to raise the grain before final sanding.

Step 6: Mount on the Wall

To mount this I went with an unconventional method. I put two gorilla hooks in the wall taking care to ensure they were level.

I placed the shelf on the hooks and made sure it was centered in the space before applying pressure so the hooks would mark the wood. I then drilled some small holes at the marks so the hooks would have a place to bite into so it will be more stable.

Obviously there are many other ways to secure it, do what you're comfortable doing.