Building a Shoe Carousel

My husband claims that he must be a KING because he has a QUEEN and 2 PRINCESSES! Seriously. He insisted on having all male dogs in an attempt to balance the raging hormones here in our household! I loved having all of the female energy here at home — we designed vanities for  each of our rooms, built a dance studio with floor to ceiling mirrors and a dance floor, and organized our hair accessories and hats all over our walls.

But my husband’s biggest beef was with OUR SHOES!

We had hundreds of shoes. Storing the shoes became a problem when our shoe racks consumed our closets and he had to move his clothes to the laundry room! Hmm. In hindsight, that probably wasn’t fair.  Even so, we bought every kind of shoe rack — the kinds that hang on doors, stackables in the closet, and we even built shoe cubbies at every entrance to our house. But still there were piles of shoes in closets. When your shoes are in piles you can’t really tell what you have, so we had to keep buying more…which can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your perpective (and/or bank balance).

My youngest daughter Jaclyn recently moved into a condo in Mountain View. Shortly after moving in, she reported that she didn’t have enough room in her (15 foot walk-in) closet for all of her shoes, so I decided to build her a shoe storage unit that could hold them all and use the least amount of floor space. Quite a tall order! I knew it needed to be a vertical design and came up with the floor-to-ceiling SHOE CAROUSEL.

I went down to San Lorenzo Lumber and showed my drawings to Mario, the foreman. He cut 24-inch circles out of half-inch plywood, which I lugged home and then drilled 1-inch holes in the center of each. Then I bought 1-inch threaded pipes with connector pieces long enough to reach from the floor to the ceiling. Wanting to make the shoe carousel spin so we could see all of the shoes at a glance, I installed a Lazy Susan (I get teased about  this every time!) between the first 2 boards. Then I placed a large washer and big nut between each board. In order to maximize our space, we measured the height of various shoes and created custom height between boards.  For boots, we left a 14-inches space while tennis shoes only needed 5 inches. Jaclyn has dozens of 6-7 inch heels so she has 2 8-inch high shelves.

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The completed Shoe Carousel has 13 shelves that are 24-inches wide.  By putting 6 PAIRS of shoes on each shelf, it could hold at least 78 pairs of shoes (that’s 156 shoes!). We topped off the shoe carousel with a closet-pole holder to keep the pole in place when you turn the carousel. With a quick spin, we can see every shoe we own and we’ve probably saved lots of money to boot (pun intended). This was an easy and very practical project, and now Jaclyn has tons of floor space in her closet. Problem solved!