Tuesday Shoesday – Superstar shoe storage

As I stood on the spiky edge of a stiletto heel and hopped around in pain for the third time in a week I realised it was time to get my shoe storage sorted. Imagine the pain when you accidentally step on an upturned plug and you’ll know how sore my sole I was. I angrily kicked that wayward shoe back under the bed and started making a plan to organise my footwear. Just as soon as this bruising on the arch of my foot goes down.After years of chucking pairs of pumps under the bed and shoving shoes beneath my chest of drawers (and inevitably never being able to find a matching pair when I needed them) I got to work on creating a sensible place to store my shoes and enlisted hubby’s help to shift a shelving unit into the bedroom. I had this G-Plan teak unit in my previous home and had used it for its original purpose – a bookshelf – for the past 5 years. But now I had bigger plans for this piece of mid-century modern furniture and I excitedly relocated the books to my little vintage caravan before getting to work.

The unit needed a good clean (just how dusty can books get?) and where it’d been knocked over the years we sanded down the edges and treated it with a spray of teak oil. Once the unit was fit to receive its new occupants we wrestled it into place beside my dressing table and I began to fill it with all my old favourites.

I tried to squeeze 5 pairs onto each shelf, but it quickly started to look like a bargain bin in a shoe shop so I decided to cut it down to four beautifully positioned pairs per shelf. I also discovered that brogues are longer than all of my other shoes so they wouldn’t fit within the glass-fronted cupboard doors and were promptly relegated to the shelf below.

Of course, the volume of shoes that I own wouldn’t all fit on the shelves so I popped a few back into their boxes and piled these on the bottom shelf. I also took the plunge and cleared out a few pairs to the charity shop. Just because they are a little too small for my feet and pinch when I walk doesn’t mean that they won’t fit Cinderella someone else perfectly so I won’t deny them the chance to live a fulfilled life any longer.

Even after sending 7 pairs to be rehomed, I still need a little extra space so next weekend’s task will be putting up a couple of shelves above the cabinet for the last of my precious pumps. In the meantime, I’m loving being able to see all my shoes and it feels a little like having my very own shoe museum now that I’m storing the prettiest pairs behind glass. I have even been wearing a bigger variety than usual – I usually stick to 3 pairs in rotation – just because they are right there. That’s a good start already, isn’t it?

What do you think? Would you like to have all your shoes on display or do you prefer to keep them neatly boxed away? What is your shoe storage system like? Let me know if this has inspired you to repurpose a shelving using of your own and tweet me photos of your shoe storage to @Cassiefairy.