The Shoe Shelf of Happiness

As I've alluded to several times; I have a thing for shoes. I'll chalk it up to being another one of those unavoidable female traits. I love playing outside, getting dirty, firefighting, jumping in rivers, etc.....but damn it I also have a serious soft spot for a sassy, leather stacked-wood platform sandal (among other shoe types).

On sale at Zappos.
These might get ordered later today....we'll see how much willpower I have.

To facilitate my habit, my walk in closet needed some heel-specific storage. It's not a big closet, and in addition to heels, I have a good number of flats. The flats are stored in 2 cubby organizers set long-side-down. They are short enough this way to live under the closet rods and still let the clothes above hang freely, making the most of all available floor space.

Thank you Martha Stewart.
$35 each from Home Depot. $5 each from Craigslist.

All the cubby space is occupied by flats, boots, hiking shoes, blah blah blah; and no other horizontal space is available in the closet for ze heels. So as I've done before....to the wall!

I'd seen Pins about using crown moulding to create heel-specific shelves and decided to give it a try.

Pin

Pin

The ReStore had a whole stack of crown for all of about $0.15/ft. I found a huge piece with a simple profile that was pretty an not at all foofy. After buying ~20 feet I set about building the shelves (without reading any instructions, looked easy enough).

1. Cut up ~20 ft of crown into 6 equal pieces.
2. Drilled 2 pilot holes in each piece.
3. Painted each piece bright turquoise/blue.
4. Measured and marked the wall so they would be evenly spaced from floor to ceiling.
5. Held up each piece and squirted chalk dust through the holes to mark anchor locations.
6. Inserted anchors.
7. Screwed shelves in place.

And finally, to the sound of angels singing: hung up the first set of heels......which immediately fell off.
Oh Blergh!!

I had some rolls of clear plastic drawer liner (random Ikea purchase for the win!) which I cut into strips and attached to the top of each shelf with clear adhesive. The big-boy kind of adhesive from a caulk gun mind you, cuz we don't play around with shoe safety in these parts.

plenty of room for more
awwww yeeeaahhh

The heels now all stay up safe 'n' sound, except when people are coming over in 5 mins and I wildly 'put away' clothes and other random items by launching them into the closet. I am a consummate hostess, clearly.



-Lindsay



*Update: I did get the shoes. Luckily I showed the bf right when they arrived, as he was about to order them for me as a surprise. What a guy!
They are every bit of adorable I hoped they would be, AND comfortable. Those babies will be logging a lot of non-shelf time.

Creating custom adjustable shelving, ala the Container Store

Aside from painting top to bottom, built-in closet shelving was the first homeowner improvement project I tackled. I was giddy, I was broke, but I had a plan.

I may have mentioned it before, but my place is the condo-o-storage. It has more useful and plentiful storage than any ~1000 condo I've ever seen. Clearly, it was meant to be mine.
There are a remarkable FOUR hallway closets; a pantry, a linen closet, a coat closet, and a big empty space closet with a single upper shelf.
With a myriad of tools and materials for all my renovation projects, and no garage; I had to come up with a better storage solution than tossing everything in the big-empty-space closet.
I dreamed of Container Store Elfa shelving with vertical silver tracks and wooden shelves.

same size and # of shelves as I needed in the closet

Only $745 installed or $565 'DIY'........
Oh please to the %*#$ no.

I had a pile of fantastic old pine boards salvaged several years ago from a house I'd rented that was being torn down. They were the standard closet upper shelves, already finished in a pretty amber color.

comme ça

Using them for the shelves' surface was the linchpin in making this project possible, as I couldn't afford to buy all new hardwood boards, and saggy MDF was not gonna happen.
The hallway closet door doesn't run the full width of the closet, so I planned for 2 deep shelves on the bottom and 3 shallower ones above to get as much surface space as possible while allowing easy access to all shelves.

There were several different shelving systems at  my local Home Depot.
Pricey name brand ClosetMaid? Um, no thanks sister, I'll keep the $150 you would have cost and keep lookin.
Rubbermaid was the champ at $8 an upright, $3.75 for long brackets, and $3 for short ones.

upright

bracket

This broke out to:

$8 x 2 uprights =$16

$3.75 x 2 pairs of brackets = $15

$3 x 3 pairs of brackets = $18

    $4 x 1 box of anchors and screws = $4    

$53

Since $53 is about 9% of the high end $565 price tag: I was a proud, proud, thrifty gal.

Handy Dad and I ripped out the single upper shelf already in the closet to install the new tracks. The two holes we accidentally punched in the wall were just a bonus.
We hung the tracks starting about 6 inches down from the ceiling and ending about 8 inches up from the ground. This covered all the areas where I'd possibly want to have brackets for a shelf.
We then used the ripped out shelf as a guide to cut the pine boards to size. Something we learned here, that we keep re-learning; is that in a 40 year old building: nothing is square. Start with a pattern and then adjust for each instance of that item. That being said, unsuprisingly some shelves came out with a little wiggle room and others had to be trimmed down to fit. Between the track and the pine boards, we used scrap wood from Handy Dad's impressive garage collection to fill out the depth each shelf needed.
Each bracket has a hole for a screw, but I have neither done anything with that nor noticed the need to since construction.

hello there Garage Closet!

Not the prettiest girl at the dance, but heck, she's gonna be a glorified tool box. No worries princess.

Having gotten the hang of it, we went ahead and knocked out another set in the 2nd bedroom closet. There were two identical closets in there, each with a top shelf and hanging bar. Shelving was badly needed in one of them for office/sporting/random items, as all that hanging space would be wasted.

The wall came out unscathed on this one, but still no beauty queen in sight with those two franken-shelves on the bottom. Again though, its a closet. No one but the 5 people that read this blog (hi honey!) will see it; and inexpensive/functional/awesome always beats accumulating more debt. The mortgage alone is plenty!




-Lindsay