Interior Painting: Paint Trim Faster with this Simple Paint Drying Rack
Updated: Feb. 13, 2023We used a reader tip to turn a spare room into a paint shop outfitted with a paint drying rack.
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During a recent rec room project, my wife and I used a spare bedroom in our home as our paint shop for trim. After a short amount of painting, we had trouble finding a place to put each piece of trim to dry. She would finish three or four 8-ft.-long pieces of trim and run out of space on our sawhorses. I thought about the dilemma for a while and then remembered a Shop Rat tip. In the March ’10 issue of Family Handyman, reader Lois Mogler shared the paint drying rack idea that she and her husband use when painting trim. Their rack (shown to the right) was clamped to their garage door track. It was the perfect solution, but I needed to adapt the concept for use inside our home since it was the dead of winter and pretty darn cold in our garage.
How to build a paint drying rack
My solution used the same concept: 8-ft.-long 1x2s with 16d nails set equidistant apart. To support the vertical stanchions of the rack, I used a pair of stools. I leaned one of the 1x2s against the back side of the stool and clamped it on. To make the racks more stable, I leaned each 1×2 against the wall. To protect our painted wall, I wrapped the top of each 1×2 with a shop rag.
Since my version of the rack was built with 1x2s and not 2x4s, and since it wouldn’t be anchored to something stable like a garage door track, I lowered its capacity (lessening the chance of an epic rack failure). On my rack, the nails that support the drying trim are positioned roughly 8 in. apart instead of 6.
With the paint drying rack in place, the paint department was working efficiently and able to keep pace with the finish carpentry department.
— Erik Bergstrom, Community Manager
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