One of our goals for our June Project Challenge was to use some of the vintage sheets we’ve been hoarding. Today we finally have one vintage sheet project down (and several in-progress): we used a vintage sheet to make a hammock-like pet net in Eliza’s closet for all of her stuffed animals.
Stuffed animals were my favorite collection when I was little. I named them all, assigned them all personalities, and taught them whatever I was learning in school at the time. I’m glad that Eliza and Jonas have their own collection of future students to whom they can pass on nerdisms, but they were starting to take over:
Yikes! Those hamper things weren’t cutting it. DIY to the rescue.
To make this hammock-style “pet net” for Eliza’s stuffed animals, I trimmed down a vintage sheet (it was a fitted sheet, I trimmed the sections of fabric with the gathered corners so I just had a flat rectangle). I hemmed the sides and made casing on two ends (for how to do this, read our DIY Door Panel tutorial).
Then Jake and I drilled holes through each end of two wooden dowel rods using a drill bit. If you try this, it’s really important to make sure that the holes on both sides of the dowel rod are going through in the same direction.
After slipping the dowel rods through the sheet casing, we screwed the dowel rods directly into the wall using long wood screws. So there’s a dowel rod attached to both walls in Eliza’s closet, with the sheet hanging in between, creating a hammock effect.
We were going to put string through the holes in the dowel rods and hang the hammock-style net from the ceiling with hooks in the middle of her room, but we realized that she’d have an easier time getting to the toys if we hung it in her closet. If you want to try this but don’t have two walls close together, you might want to try that “fishing line + ceiling hooks” route.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering why we didn’t just buy a cheap, ugly pet net since it’s in her closet, we’d like to brag that this project cost us under $4 total to make (sheet, screws, thread, and dowel rods).
We’re happy that Eliza now has a home for all of those stuffed animals! And she sort of has built-in steps in her weird closet, so getting animals up and down will be no problem.
Yay to using supplies AND getting stuff organized!
To read more tutorials from the Nerd Nest, click here. To find more projects from the Nerd Nest, click here.