DIY: Turning a Rod Floor Rack Into a Ceiling Rack

Finished racks before mounting on ceiling.

If you own a rolling or standard floor rack for storing your rods when not in use, you know how much space they can take up depending on the rack’s size. I happen to have a small garage which is quickly being filled up my my girlfriend’s obsession for holiday decorations and my ever-expanding outdoor hobbies. As we ran out of space on the outskirts of the garage, it was time to move the fishing rods somewhere. What better place than the garage ceiling? There’s plenty of space up there!

In this DIY article, I’ll show step-by-step how I turned my run of the mill ‘Offshore Angler’ rod rack that used to be on the floor rolling with casters into a ceiling rack using only a few screws and some drilling.

What you’ll need:

• The old rod rack; preferably one which was a standard rectangle shape with two rows of rods on each side
• A box of screws; Drywall screws, wood screws, etc.
• Wood glue
• Drill(s) with the proper bits for your screws and a counter-sink bit
• Time and ingenuity as you might have to improvise and just use this project as a basis since each rack is different

What to do:

Disassemble the rack and stare at the parts. Here’s what my pile looked like. After staring at it for a few minutes I had a game plan about how I was going to put it back together in it’s new configuration.

Remove the wooden dowels that sort of held it together before, also remove any screws and washers like I did in the photo above when disassembling it.

Line up your pieces (see finished photo of the racks below or above) and drill counter-sunk holes for your screws so you don’t split the most likely cheap wood when drilling the new screws in.

Use wood glue at the seam where you will screw the two pieces into each other and then mate them with a screw ready in the drill since this will be tricky due to one hand drilling and one hand holding the pieces together (or ask for help).

Here’s a counter-sunk screw in one of the posts I cut up to form the second half of the ceiling rack.

Ta-da! Done. You may have noticed I skipped a bunch of steps. That’s because I know that each rod rack is completely different, and unless you have this exact same model your pieces might also be different making you go for some scrap wood to complete the project.

As you can see below, I basically used the same holed pieces which held the rods and just screwed in the pieces of wood which were slanted on the rod rack that held the butt’s of the rods off the floor into the tops of the holed pieces. This just give us a surface to secure the holed rack pieces into the wall vertically. On the second piece, I used my circular saw to cut up the two thin pieces of wood to size, that way I could use the holed piece of woof from the lower part of the rack to hold the middle portions of the rod and give them some space to slide through when I mount them up.

I was lucky enough that the old rack had enough wood and pieces to cut up to make the above racks.

Now for a really horrible night-time photo of the finished product screwed into my ceiling joists…

Hopefully you can re-purpose your old floor rack and turn it into a sweet ceiling rack too instead of throwing it away!