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Shoe Box

When we picked up these finds from The City Flea, we told you we had a plan for each. The frame will be used as – get this – a frame (she’s actually in her new home, and she’s beautiful – more on that next week!), but the metal crate? It’s now being used to house our shoes. Practical, but cute too.

We have (scratch that – had) a serious where do we put our shoes? problem in this house, partially out of laziness, but mostly because it’s so annoying to bring our outside shoes all the way down the hall and back in our closets. I mean, can you just imagine how far that feels? (Ha!) For the most part, we each leave a pair outside our front door (I’m sure our neighbors must love us!), but it’d been normal to find a few of my kicks strewn in the hallway. Yup, even type-A me can slip – and it drove Scott crazy.

So! We picked up 4 small casters (you know we love those), a coir mat, and a couple packs of machine screws/nuts from the hardware store. I know almost nothing about how to select the proper size screw, but I can tell you that we simply took our caster and did a quick dry fit to find out we needed 2 packs of #10-24 x 1/2″ – enough for 16 screws/nuts total. The size will vary based on what casters you pick out, of course.

First, we flipped our crate over and eyeballed the placement of our casters, marking where our screws would need to go. We knew you wouldn’t be able to see the casters once the crate was in place (due to the placement of the vent holes on the bottom), so we just nudged them as far out as we could for balance.

Scott drilled our 16 holes (4 for each caster), and we secured the casters in place with the screws and nuts. We chose to have the end of the screw poke up and through the bottom of our bin, because we knew we’d be covering them with our coir mat.

About the mat: because we’d be using this for our shoe storage, we cut down a coir mat to fit the base of our crate. This will be helpful on rainy/snowy days, allowing our shoes to drain. To cut it to size, I flipped it over, made my measurements, and made several passes with my utility blade. The trick to getting a clean edge and keeping yourself safe is to make many “soft” cuts until you feel your blade go all the way through.

That’s it! We dubbed it the “Shoe Box” (because we seem to need a name for everything around here) and tucked it under our entryway console. You can tell that it’s virtually impossible to see our casters, but it’s nice to be able to slide this guy around if needed – you know, because, why not?

The fall weather has me stashing my every day boots for now, and although this photo might not make it seem like it, we can actually fit my boots and a pair of Scott’s shoes, too.

And, oh yeah, we replaced our entry rug! After pinning a few ideas, we settled on the 2’x3′ Kite Kilim during West Elm’s rug sale. While we loved our DIY FLOR for the last few years, it had been abused by Jack, the girls and us daily. Because it was right next to the front door, it was constantly filthy – even though I spot cleaned it weekly. In addition, our new living room FLOR is much larger than our previous shaggy rug, and with all the carpeted hardwood, well, everything just felt too, uh, ruggy.

We finally surrendered our idea of the big, grand entry rug, and we realized it made more sense to have a small rug as an anchor to our console. To be honest, we’re still getting used to the smaller scale, so we’ll live with it for a while and see how it goes. Nothing has to be permanent; isn’t that the best part of loving your home?

Try as I might (and because everything in our home is mini-sized) it’s impossible to take a photo of our console/crate/rug straight on (I can’t stand back far enough to get everything in the frame) – that is, unless, I shoot from outside our front door. Of course as soon as I opened the door, Jack took this as a sign we’d be going on a w-a-l-k, so he wouldn’t budge. On the up side, he weasled his way into a post on our Shoe Box. The ridiculous neck-stretch-air-sniff is due to our neighbor’s yummy cooking; the scent fills the entire main hall!

Shoe woes: solved! No more throngs of sneakers on our welcome mat, and no more agony (ugh!) over having to tote our shoes to our closets.

How do you stash yours? We wonder if living in one unit of a larger building makes this harder; by keeping one or two pairs outside our door, our neighbors have to see them everyday, too. What are the unspoken rules?

PS: When it comes to discarding your old FLOR, did you know you can recycle them? Sweet.

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  • Lindsey d.10.12.12 - 7:50 AM

    Love the crate! I have a very similar backdoor shoe holder, thanks to a $6 antique soft drink crate. Even when I don’t always manage to get my shoes into it (or they overflow), it gives me incentive to keep my pile of footwear at the backdoor a bit neater. Love it!

    http://slowtrier.wordpress.com/2012/04/11/wordless-wednesdays-6-antique-store-find-running-shoe-holder/ReplyCancel

  • Julia [Chris Loves Julia]10.12.12 - 10:28 AM

    Oh, you guys are so cool. It’s perrrrfect. We had a serious shoe problem by our door. Like, 10 pairs at a time. I don’t even know where they all came from! We went with the slim shoe storage from Ikea which has been working like a charm, but it definitely isn’t as charming as this.ReplyCancel

  • Sara10.12.12 - 11:05 AM

    I’m from the Grand Rapids area….lovin the crate!ReplyCancel

  • Jenny10.12.12 - 12:10 PM

    We are trying to rehab an old dresser. We have a TON of shoes and they always end up in a pile.ReplyCancel

  • emily @ go haus go10.12.12 - 12:50 PM

    I love all the Cincinnati mentions on this blog! The Foxy Shazam shirt is the icing on the cake.ReplyCancel

    • Kim10.14.12 - 1:40 PM

      Lindsey, what a great find!

      Emily, bravo for mentioning Foxy! Scott and I fight over who gets to wear that shirt all the time. We hope you’ve had a chance to see them live – they are TOO much!

      Thanks, guys!ReplyCancel

  • Cody3.27.21 - 1:10 PM

    This photo showed in Google images for something totally unrelated but the Foxy Shazaam brought me here just to leave a comment. Dang those were the good days! I remember seeing them at Mad Hatter back in the day!ReplyCancel

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