Modern kitchen paper towel holder

I'd been meaning to get a second roll of paper towels for the other end of our kitchen. We had a nice space available on the underside of a cabinet in the ideal location, and I wanted to permanently mount a paper towel holder there.

I also wanted the gizmo to vibe with other interior details of our Danish Modern house; for reference, here's a close-up of our stair railings fabricated by Bart at Build LLC:

After a half hour of internet shopping I gave up and decided to just make the dang thing myself. If nothing else, this would be a nice diversion from all the woodworking on the cottage.

I got some square stock and some round from Home Depot (sigh):

I then cut them to length, drilled holes into the square stock to receive the round, and also fabbed up some bar stock I had floating around to become a mounting plate:

Time to weld and grind (I just flat welded the ends of the square stock where it had received the round and that turned out to be perfectly sufficient):

Then I primed and painted the thing with flat black automotive spray paint and installed it a day later. For the record, it's perfectly even and level, it just looks a bit off due to the perspective in the photo...

Lessons learned

• Invariably any welding project is 5% welding and the rest spent on cutting, grinding, cleaning, etc.
  • However, by virtue of maintaining a clean and well-configured shop, this was still only a two hour exercise, other than the trip to Home Depot.
  • Welding, even if it's only 5% of the project, is still tremendously fun.
• Automotive paint is awesome and somehow consistently works better than spray paint from the big box stores despite costing the same.
• Note to self: this is probably my last welding project before it's time to get more argon.