Ikea Hacked Shoe Storage Wall

Greatly inspired by the fantastic website Ikea Hacker I got my brain churning on how to use the space upstairs in the hall behind the glass wall for storage. We are a bit tight on closet space without the storage room for off-season wear and there are literally shoes everywhere. So I got the grand idea to try to put together some custom shoe storage setup there.

Originally that section of the wall was supposed to be see-through blue and green glass but after the installation mix-up downstairs we go the opaque glass up there instead. This actually turned out to be a good thing as that jog of space between the two steel beams in the hall was now usable. If you can consider 8 inch deep space usable, that is. 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. Like this…

I would stack 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 or 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.

I already I owned a set of three Trones shoe holders in white

As it turned out three of these units stacked on top of each other was the exact right height to hit the divider on the glass wall frame—rockin! And four across was the exact right width to avoid the clear glass that will be installed in the last pane shortly. For another $120 I picked up three more sets and got to work on painting and fastening them.

Here is a detail photo of the depth of the space that the unit would occupy

These are meant to screw into the wall from the back, but again that wasn't an option for us. So I used small screws to fasten the units together from the side. That plus the weight of the shoes made the whole unit pretty stable.

Here are the units stacked in place with no doors (missing just one on the top far right)

Detail of side screws

We painted the fronts of the cabinets blue, green and silver to match the overall pattern of the wall. Remember what the wall is supposed to look like?

And what the top half looks like so far from the other side?

So here is the painted front shoe wall. We used Rustoleum's standard blue, green and light gray spray paint. The flash makes the blue much brighter than it is normally.

There is not enough space to get a head on shot, but as you can see it fits flush with the steel beams and doesn't impede on the hall space at all.

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.