DIY: Built-in Shoe Shelf

I had been thinking of what to do with the store room in our corridor. Struck by inspiration and by the lack of space for our shoes, we decided to convert it into a shoe storage. 

This is what we had to begin with. The previous owners had drilled a whole bunch of holes into the room. The pole at the top was very inconvenient as it was too high for me to hang anything. Above the rod was more room but inaccessible from outside.

The walls were grubby and dirty. It probably does not show here but it was yellow and dull.

 After dusting the place out, I started the tedious task of plucking out all the wall plugs. Some of them had disintegrated already so I jammed the edges further in. 

 The next task was to spackle. I used Polyfilla.

Meanwhile, my husband was sawing away at MDF boards down to size. Bless him it was labour-intensive using a manual saw.

My next task was to paint the walls. I used leftover paint from our hall paint. I did two coats. It looked so different and clean after the fresh coats of paint.

After painting the walls, it was time to paint the skirting boards which were yellower than pirates' teeth. For this, I used a white oil-based paint instead which stank to high heavens. But the result made me so happy. You can see it in the very first picture above.

We had a slightly different colour paint as well leftover from our previous paint jobs. I used that to paint the pieces of wood that would make the shelves. We had customised the sizes of the shelves too. Wider ones near to the top for my husband's shoes and smaller ones below so that it would be neater and we could hang our socks from the door without banging into wider shelves. We also made a very wide shelf to go at the very top to store other items in that inaccessible space above.

My husband also made these little shelf supports from some leftover wood sticks we had in the garage. Waste not is our motto when it comes to DIY.

 I've got to give the husband major credit for putting up these shelves so beautifully. We didn't want to screw in each shelf and saw this great idea online to use small pieces of wood as supports. Much less visible and clunky than regular shelf supports.

A side-by-side for comparison. I couldn't be more pleased with the end result. We calculated the space between the shelves carefully as well. You can see further down the space is narrower to fit slippers and flats. We now store extra bedding and duvets in the top space which was previously vacant. The very bottom was customised to fit our boots and wellies.