Shoe Rack Design

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. After cutting the wood, I did a quick test assemble with some of my shoes.

It worked and was able to carry the weight of the shoes, so the next step was to polish it.

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 each rack. [Update: this was completed!]
• 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.