Hot Wheels Collection Organization ~ the words

From the blog: a Low and behold life (link in 1st paragraph)

My wife found a really nice solution to store our son's HUGE Hot Wheels collection online. I can't recall if it was Pinterest or Google Images where she found the photo, but regardless of where it was seen, it's true source was from a blog called a Lo and behold life. They repurposed a wooden shoe rack from Bed Bath and Beyond into a really cool and useful shelf system for their twins' toy cars.

We decided to give the DIY project a shot. The shoe racks were available at our local Bed Bath and Beyond store, so we picked those up last Friday. We commenced to painting them the following day using our new handy dandy Wagner paint sprayer. It took Jodi some trial and error with the sprayer to figure out what works best, but she had everything painted in record time. She also used a ton of paint in record time. I expect that we will get the settings all optimized the more we use the sprayer. However, right now, it appears that there's a trade off of paint usage to speed and ease of application. Maybe, I'll do an official review of this sprayer once we have used it a lot more and figured out how to better balance ease and efficiency.

We hung our shelves differently than how our inspiration did. They connected two shelves in tandem so that each shelf was wider than the cars. We stuck with one shelf because the vast majority of the cars easily straddle the single shelf. By straddling the shelf, the cars don't roll around when you take them down or put them up like they would if they were sitting on their wheels. This makes them more stable on the shelf. And, as a bonus, we were able to make twice as many shelves as we would have otherwise.

With the cars having to straddle the shelves, however, I was going to have to space the shelf out from the wall about a half inch. I could have bought spacers or used washers or something, but the cheapest and most customizable option was to get a 30" PEX water supply line from Home Depot (pictured to the right) and then cut it up with a utility knife to make the perfect length spacers for this application. One of these lines is only $1.58 at my local Home Depot store.

Here's how our shelves turned out. Lyric loves them and meticulously placed all his cars on the shelves himself with pride. Now he has easy access to all his cars. He can see them all, so he can pick which ones he wants to play with. And, he'll have fun putting his cars up when he is done.

We also built a bunch of shelves out of pallet wood that was being discarded at my work. I snatched it all up and Lyric and I made a bunch of shabby-chic shelves in no time.