What Are the Best Tips for Making a DIY Shoe Rack?

My sister gave me her homemade shoe rack when she moved away to college. My dad had made it for her, because she had so many shoes, and they had started to take over the house. However, she wouldn’t have room for the rack in her dorm.

The rack was made entirely of wood and extended from the floor to the ceiling. It had several evenly spaced shelves that could hold three pairs of shoes each. Every shelf was slightly tilted upward so that the shoes would not slide off onto the floor.

I still have the shoe rack, but now, it resides in my guest bedroom. I keep a sheet tacked to the top to serve as a curtain to hide the shoes, but it can easily be pulled aside when I need to retrieve a pair.

My grandmother made one of those shoe racks that you hang on the back of a door. She used fabric and foam board, and it worked out great.

The foam board is inserted into small slits in the fabric. She used it for support under each section where a shoe is to be inserted. The fabric alone might not have been able to handle the weight of some of the heavier shoes.

Foam board can be cut to size with a box cutter, so she decided this would be better than using wood. My grandmother does not like saws, and she wanted to stick with something she could craft herself.

@shell4life - That sounds sort of like what my husband made. He used two-pronged pegs, but he also included a shelf above each peg rack for extra shoes.

We both have a lot of shoes that we like to have easy access to by the door, so we really needed the extra shelves. I have a pair of lace-up sneakers, a pair of slip-on sneakers, sandals, slippers, and flip-flops that I wear often, and now I can keep them all in one place.

My husband also has a lot of shoes, and he had a bad habit of leaving them lying all over the floor in many rooms of the house. Now, he has no excuse for doing that. The shoe rack has made my life easier in this way, too!

My husband and I had to make our own shoe rack after we got a puppy with a taste for leather and cloth. We needed to be able to put our shoes up high enough that he could not reach them.

My husband got some horseshoe shaped pegs with screws on the back from a hardware store. He screwed these into a piece of wood and spray-painted the whole rack black for uniformity.

We have two boards with three pegs on each one, and they are screwed into the wall behind our front door. This shoe rack can hold six pairs, and we can put our shoes there as soon as we come home, so the puppy has no chance to grab them as a snack.

A friend of mine made this really cool DIY shoe rack out of old 20oz soda bottles. I am not sure exactly how it all worked but basically a bunch of the shoe bottles were strung together into a grid with the bottles angled upward. You could fit one shoe onto each bottle.

It was a really cool idea and it worked perfectly. She had some heels that she couldn't fit on the soda bottles but otherwise all her shoes were stored in a neat and organized way plus she got to turn the whole thing into a funky, green project.

It was a little dirty but I washed it with a hose and let in dry in the sun. Once it was dry I filled it with shoes and it worked perfectly. Best of all, it was completely free.