Ikea Hacking: Shoe Storage Wall

Greatly inspired by the fantastic website Ikea Hacker I got my brain churning on how I could do my own Ikea hack.  It's just such a fantastic idea and I was extemely impressed with the great ideas people had come up with.  I settled on trying to create a shoe storage wall in our hallway, as we had a a 100 inch long, but only 8 inch deep space that was unusable for pretty much anything else.  

I wracked my brain for some sort of good, affordable solution for that tight space and came up with a good one based on this sideboard idea. Instead of using kitchen cabinets I would use 8" deep bathroom cabinets with the Ommen glass and aluminum doors.

I planned on stacking two of these on top of one another and have 6 rows of two across the length of the wall. The cabinets would need to be fasten together on the sides and then have legs added to them since the backs could not be fastened to the glass wall benind them or the aluminum frame. This solution would have been very nice but the price tag was upwards of $600 to put it together. While that was not astronomical, I figured we could do something faster, better and with less hassle. Plus you would be able to see the shoes through the glass and the finished look might have been too busy.

Then I found the set of three Trones shoe holders in white for $40 each and bought four of them for just $160.   They are also meant to screw into the wall from the back, but again that wasn't an option for us. So I used small screws 3/4 inch #6 screws to fasten the units together from the side. That plus the weight of the shoes made the whole unit pretty stable. 

For finish coloring we painted the swing down door fronts blue, green and silver to match the overall pattern of the wall. We used Rustoluem spraypaint designed for spraying on plastic surfaces, two coats on each door. 

We also painted the tops and exposed side with Rustoleum's aluminum paint to blend with the frame of the wall and give the whole thing a finished look. 

The whole unit should hold about 36 pairs of shoes. And it fits with our penchant for displaying bad tetris moves.