SHOE STORAGE

When you walk in my house, the first thing you usually see is where my kids came in and threw up their school day: a huge pile of backpacks, winter coats, shoes, hats, papers and art projects. On its BEST day my "mudroom" looks something like this:

When we built our house, we really had ourselves convinced this space was good enough to hold the bazillion pairs of shoes we wear every day.

 

Not. even. close.

I've been looking for a cute storage solution for all these shoes for years.

I've seen shelves in the garage. This does not work for me. I've killed mice and black widows in that garage. I am not putting my shoes out there for them to live in.

I've seen the "wall of squares". We even went to The Home Depot and priced out MDF to build a wall of squares in this corner. The price was still almost $150. For MDF! I waited for a better solution. And I'm glad I did because last month I visited two homes who really figured this thing out.

Check out my neighbor Keysha's beautiful custom cabinetry:

My favorite part about this is how real is it. Inside that cabinet her shoes are as big a mess as mine. But with the doors closed -- Poof! Gone! Brilliant.

But I don't have the money to buy custom cabinetry right now so I pretty much had this on my "five year wish list". Then, I visited my brother and his wife Heather and saw this in their house:

My brother made this with three upper cabinets from Lowes and added a piece of trim at the top.

I. Love. It.

It's pretty economical to buy these from Lowes, but I am on the lookout for used cabinets that I can paint a cute green like Keysha's. Who knew the solution to shoe storage could be so simple?

If you have another great idea for shoe storage, share it with us!

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