These are fantastic towel rods; I love the smooth lack of ornamentation. I couldn't live without them after installing four 30" rods in one bathroom, so I just installed a pair of 24" rods in a different bathroom. As one reviewer clearly suffered an incompetent installer, I was mindful of the installation process, and I'd like to provide some notes. If you think I'm overthinking the problem, go study Japanese woodworking, or contemplate why some people will pay some other people $300 to cook a single meal for them. Compared to this, towel bars are easy. People who don't have law degrees are often just as smart in different ways. I'm an amateur but I'm guessing that these thoughts all run through the mind of a good handyman. If you can't afford such a handyman (my contractor was the best available and we joked that he couldn't afford me as I insisted on installing these rods myself) then don't complain about the rods. They are a well-designed and well-constructed raw material. Select a contractor or take care yourself consistent with your likelihood of discriminating minor installation quirks, which fortunately can be corrected after the fact by partly reversing these instructions. Or, denial isn't just a river in Africa, it's a life skill. Learn to live with the work you can afford or carry out.First, study the rods themselves closely on arrival, before installation. Understand the role of each aspect of the design, which were deliberate decisions by thoughtful engineers. Check the screws holding the rods together. Try the rods flush against a kitchen counter; do they look perfect, while they're still returnable? They should, although on your wall may be another matter.The crux of the installation is to get the centers of the two posts on the mounting plates exactly 24" apart, to an accuracy at the absolute limit of your ability to perceive or measure. Every step of the process gives you a chance to correct previous errors, if they are not too great.First, the towel bars come with templates. Masking tape these templates into position, using a level to check that they are absolutely level. Now, there are mild printing errors in such templates, the paper is not dimensionally stable with respect to humidity, and most importantly, walls aren't perfectly flat. Using either a metal ruler or a tape measure stretched flat with all your strength, figure out where 24" apart really is, and mark it. Now, drill 1/8" guide holes. Do your best to find the centers of your marks.Remove the templates and measure again. In my case I drilled 1/4" holes (although in hindsight I would have loved to have gone down 1/64"), and I cheated them in my guide holes to compensate for the errors that I measured at this step.At this step I vacuumed each hole, then filled them with white acrylic artist paint (from a tube) before inserting and hammering flush the anchors. In my walls (some odd plaster over concrete in a postwar New York City apartment) I find anchors frustrating without a little help like this. I gave considerable thought to choosing the best possible glue here, before remembering that artist acrylic paint is one of the strongest and easiest to use glues available. I could have then oiled or bike-greased the screws to make sure they'd come out if ever necessary; I skipped this step, which was probably a mistake. If these anchors fail, I'm tearing them out of the wall and preparing a broader area in any case, so this oversight doesn't bother me.Now, screw in each mounting base, leaving a little wiggle. Slide on the towel bars and press to make them look perfect. Remove, and study what happened to the screws in the upper slots. One could be forgiven for assuming that these slots are to correct for screws that aren't vertically aligned, but this would be exactly missing their point. In fact, the towel bars can tolerate a bit of twist to these posts (they don't have to be square to vertical and horizontal) and using the play in the slot adjusts the exact distance between the pair of posts. You want this distance to be exactly 24". Measure, then make it 24" and tighten the screws, and try the bars again. Compare with how the slots looked before when you wiggled the bar into trial position. Because there was different play on both sides, the trial positioning may have used more play from one slot than the other. Fairly share the correction between the two slots. When you're all done fiddling, let any anchor aid (such as my artist paint) dry completely before loading the anchor with the weight of the towel bars and towels.The art here is to thoroughly enjoy being more critical and aware of the towel bars, their position and essential nature, than one will ever be again in use. Remember that Steve Jobs' adoptive father took the same care with backs of furniture as the front. This point of view is a way of life.
