We have a closet right inside our garage (which is where we enter the house 90% of the time) and we usually take our shoes off there. This closet is not super large in terms of square footage but it is pretty tall. To help make the space more functional we have, over time, placed more and more hooks in the closet to hang our work bags and umbrellas and coats (hooks are the mother of functionality if you didn’t know). We also wanted to put some hooks in the closet to accommodate some shoe organization. I researched a bunch of different styles. Most styles had the shoes lying flat with the sole towards the ground. This was a problem for us because our closet is quite narrow and my shoes are quite large. I wanted a rack that had the shoes hang with the soles facing outwards, to maximize the use of the vertical space over the width of the closet. I didn’t see may great options so I went with what essentially is a pegboard for shoes…
I took a bunch of pieces of scrap white wood and glued them all side by side to make two separate shoe racks that were tall and narrow. I ripped them down to the appropriate sizes, routered the edge with a roundover bit, sanded and then burned the wood with a propane torch. I used little pegs, that came with a metal screw end and planted them in the boards at a fixed distance to accommodate my shoes. I measured each one independently but failed to account for the fact that the pegs at the bottom of the upper rack would interfere with the pegs at the top of the bottom rack =(. Hence, we typically use this small space to store some of my wife’s sneakers (see the blue Nike’s below).
