Craft Corner: Shoe Rack Fix

When A and I moved into our current apartment, we knew we needed a solution to a common problem: How to best organize our shoes?  I have a hanging shoe organizer in the closet, but we have more shoes than it can hold.  

After looking around Bed Bath & Beyond and online with the requirement that it fit behind our bedroom door and not cost a ridiculous amount of money for a shoe rack, we settled on this one from BB&B.  It's expandable, so could maneuver into place and looked good.  However, we quickly ran into an issue.

The bars are too far apart to hold the shoes!  Our shoes were constantly falling down and just generally making it a pain to find the ones you wanted.  (Besides the fact that looking at that mess every day was driving me crazy!)  Heeled shoes were the worst - the heels wouldn't stand on the bars, and they'd just slip off every time.

I was just about to throw in the towel and buy a new shoe rack (one with solid boards!) when I thought to myself... can I do something to fix the shoe rack we already have?  I took a close look at the bars and came up with an idea.

I would cut fabric strips, then Velcro them across each set of bars - our shoes would sit on the fabric!  A was excited about the idea of spending less money to fix up the shoe rack instead of buying a new one, so he happily unwillingly politely sat through a trip to JoAnn to pick up the supplies. 

I used:

- 1 yard of cheap fabric (didn't actually use all of it)

- Iron-on Velcro strips

- Scissors

- Measuring tape

How to fix your shoe rack (if yours is as annoying as ours was!):

1. Measure the distance between two opposing bars.  (Ours is 8 inches wide.)

2. Cut the fabric into strips about 5 inches longer than the width of the bars. (8+5=13 inch wide fabric).  We have three sets of bars, so I cut three strips.

3. Cut pieces of the iron-on Velcro for each strip.  I used 3-inch pieces and spaced them out.

4. Iron on one row of Velcro (one of the two sides - scratchy or soft) on the end of the fabric.

5. Here's the only tricky part: Put the fabric on your shoe rack to find where to put the complementary Velcro strips (the soft side if you just ironed on the scratchy side).  I wasn't very precise - you could measure.  I just didn't.  

6. Once you've done one side (one bar), repeat the process on the other side of the fabric strip.  Then repeat the entire process on the other two strips.  

7. Hook the fabric up to your shoe rack and you're done!

Look!  My heels aren't falling!  They just sit nicely in the fabric.

The fixed-up shoe rack is now much more visually appealing.