Slanted Shoe Rack

In an effort to organize my shoes instead of leaving them in a pile, I decided to build a shoe rack for my room. It needs to be easily disassembled and use minimal materials. Because I study far from home, I move between my dorm and a summer home every year. Any extra furniture I own needs to be compact and lightweight. With these ideas, I began to sketch up some designs.

I started with the standard design of four supports and some slanted racks. Then, I reduced it to use only two supports. The bottom rack forms a triangle with the supports to act as a stand. Since shoes are lightweight, I could trade some structural stability for using fewer materials. As I sketched, I came up with the idea to include a mesh bag to hold all my socks for easy access.

I gathered the supplies and took them to a woodworking shop on campus. I cut the supports to length and then used an arm saw to cut notches (I really should have used a band saw instead, because the notches ended up varying in width). Then I used a table saw to cut up the board into four equal pieces, and a band saw to round off the corners. Finally, I ran them through various sanders to smooth the corners and surface.

After that, I took all the wood to a smaller workshop to apply wood stain, because I was allowed leave things there to dry. I tore up an old T-shirt and used it to apply the stain. It took a long time. The stain also showed where I applied glue to the end of the racks, so I will have to be more careful when gluing wood next time. Afterwards, I stitched together a bag from a piece of white mesh I obtained from another bag.

There is a number of improvements I would make. Instead of using sticky tack to hold the racks to the supports, I could simply cut out notches on the sides of the rack. The racks themselves are a little flimsy, so I would use a thicker board. The slanted supports is a good idea, but it's a bit too unstable and tends to wobble. Using a thicker board should also fix it. But otherwise, it works well as a shoe rack/sock bag and I'm still using it every day.