published Oct 11, 2022
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My home is full of oddly placed towel bars —and I really don’t know why. In the main bathroom, there are seven, and in another, there are six, that is until my child accidentally pulled several out of the wall while attempting to dislodge his towel. My kitchen also has several of them in various locations too.
Despite all the random amounts of towel bars, I don’t ever feel the need to get rid of them. Instead, I’ve discovered that there’s a way to use them to maximize storage in my home. If you ever want to use towel bars for more than just your towels, consider these alternative uses.
Attach S-hooks
S-hooks, which you might purchase for plant hanging or a garage grid storage system, can usually fit on a horizontal towel bar. One of the towel bars in my kitchen is located near a door and I placed S-hooks on them to hang my kids’ sweatshirts and backpacks. Before the S-hook revelation, my kids would enter our home via the garage and leave their backpacks on the kitchen floor, creating a trip hazard. When I would scold them to move them elsewhere, they’d plop them on the table, taking up our place to eat. S-hooks on the towel bar solved this problem.
If you were to put an S-hook on a towel bar in the bathroom, especially one off of the bedroom, you could use it as storage for scarves and purses or even as a place for hanging plants that love moisture, such as a nerve plant or pothos.
Tie bins and baskets
I use this method in the kitchen and bathroom. I take a handled fabric, plastic, or wicker bin or basket slightly smaller than the width of the bar and tie it by the handles to the bar with ribbon. Then I store stuff in it. I kept our clean masks in one in the kitchen during the height of the pandemic. It made it so we could just grab one as we were headed out the door. In the bathrooms, I have had bigger ones filled with clean hand and bath towels.
Completely inexplicably, two of the seven main bathroom towel bars are in the water closet, the room with the toilet and no sink, so I put a small bin on a lower one and filled it with extra toilet paper rolls. That way if someone were to run out, they have it handy instead of having it stored away in the cabinet under the sink. It’s also great visually to store it this way instead of on the floor or top of the toilet.
Create a storage caddy
If you buy a flat-backed shower caddy that hangs from the shower head, you can put it on an extra towel bar (attached with a hook or ribbon) and use it to store makeup or toiletries instead. In the kitchen, it could hold cleaning supplies or cooking oils. I could also see a cool wire shower caddy as a plant holder, but, at this point, everything in my home is a plant holder or potential surface for a plant.
Do you use towel bars for other purposes? Share them with us in the comments below.
