Shoe Storage

Listen everyone. I'm in a crisis here. The number of shoes strewn around the house is taking.me.over. Big shoes! Small shoes! Crocs! Rain boots! Flats! Jason's monster sneakers! Four people's worth of footwear and it's been slowly making me crazy. We don't have a mudroom and honestly, if I could choose between that or a luxurious master bathroom, I'd pick mudroom every time.

So in the last couple of weeks, I was just bopping around on the interwebs and this flashed before me:

51 Game-Changing Storage Solutions That Will Expand Your Horizons

I like to think that my horizons are already pretty broad when it comes to storage but I mean, I still clicked. I'm a sucker for that kind of stuff. A lot of the ideas I had seen here or there but I scrolled through the list and WHAP! #9 hit me.

A coat rack hung low on the wall makes a space-saving shoe rack.

Really! Because that "before" pile looks an awful lot like what I've got in my house. I thought to myself, "Self, you could make that!" and trotted off to tell Jason to make that. 

Which is just what he did. He got a piece of wood and some knobs, let me mark where I wanted them placed, and one day while I was at work, he sent me this picture:

I said AHHH! Looks great! Can you do 2 rows?

Indeed, I had not. But where Alex just looooves to come and knock the shoes off, Ashton is actually very into putting them all back. Anyway it's not a perfect solution and most of the time, the nook still looks like this.

But at least now I have the OPTION of someplace to hang up (a small fraction of) the zillions of pairs of shoes floating around. 

That picture is captioned: "The best this area will ever look."

As I suspect is true for most of those "game-changing storage solutions", it's better in theory than in practice. Now I just have to figure out where to put all the coats...