Pinterest Challenge: Upcycled Baby Gate Herb Drying Rack

I posted about a month ago about not letting cat flossing get in the way of things. By which I mean that we sometimes spend a lot of time looking at things we'd like to have or do and spend countless hours saving those ideas in notebooks or Pinterest instead of doing things. Sometimes we make excuses like not having the time (you know the stuff you're wasting pinning) and/or resources, or we make excuses about how we have more important things to do; see: flossing the cat.

If you're not already familiar with the new "recycling"  terminology I will help explain.

• Upcycled - a fancy way of saying recycled (modified) into something new, vs. recycling the materials to later be turned into something else.
• Repurposed - When you take something and use it for a new purpose. Can include repainting and Modification for completely different uses....or basically the same thing as upcycling and recycling. 

Either way, if you're looking for things on pinterest or the earth-sized-spider-feeder sometimes you need to type in the right words to find what you want. For this project I typed in "upcycled baby gate," because I had a baby gate that had been slightly damaged by dogs and the family I worked for was going to throw it out...and I despise waste. After about four hours of perusing the endless random tangents I got involved in (up to and including learning how to read Hmong so I could find better info on a really neat hat) I determined that I really needed an herb drying rack for all the herbs I was growing in the garden. I wanted something that would allow me to hang it from the ceiling and still have lots of space for drying.

Rack from the bottom now drying rosemary. None of the sprigs are tied, they are just pushed up from underneath and then pulled back down until the "branches" catch the sides of the grid.

On top of the rack some of the sprigs that were not bushy enough to hang on on their own are just laid out in the middle for drying.

Construction Notes:

This is a really low-tech design that utilized things I had laying around the house and took all of ten minutes (it took me a lot longer to blog about it). The great thing about this particular style of gate is that the frame is made of pine which is soft. I was able to quickly disassemble the gate with a saw and then sand the rough edges. Next I screwed a cup hook in each corner. I applied a little wood glue in the joints and then "lashed it together with nylon cording.

As you can see I am not an expert at "lashing" corners.

The whole rig is suspended from another cup hook in the ceiling. The suspension is two equal sized pieces of nylon cord that are looped through the short sides of the rack (folded in half and then knotting the loose ends). Both strings are then brought together and slipped on the ceiling hook.

View of one side's string

View of the pyramid the two strings create at the ceiling

So here is my baby gate rack (and I still have another piece to use for something else). Admittedly I'm so backlogged on blogging that I've lost the original link that I got the idea from. But if you are looking for other great ideas on similar repurposing projects pinterest is a great place to start. If you want to follow my board of crazy things you know what to do.

Next pinterest challenge backlog will be citrus infused vinegar cleaner, but not until I've posted all about my homemade vinegar.