Shoes? What Shoes?

We always enter our house through the garage and then the laundry room. We never use our front door (anyone else do that??). This is fine in the summer when it's all flip flops and bare feet, but in the wintertime the laundry room quickly becomes full of shoes, boots, dirt and salt from the icy roads {yuck!}. This quickly got on my nerves this year and one day while going through my blog reader Ana White's blog popped up {if you don't follow her, you should!} with this amazing shoe storage plan. Ana's blog is chock full of great plans for just about anything you can make with wood. {I really want our next project to be this bed.}

I immediately forwarded the shoe cabinet plans to the hubby and told him that I needed him to make this for me that weekend. Always up for a challenge (I told hubby that in the instructions it says it's not for the beginner and hubby promptly reminded me that he did receive the golden hammer in Shop Class. Touche!) - he read through the plans and we made a trip to Home Depot. He finished it in a few days and we started using it even though it looked like this because it was too cold to paint.

Thankfully last week we had a few warm days so he painted it the beautiful gray color that is also in our master bedroom. All of our shoes are now nicely tucked away and off of the floor. Now if I could just keep up with the salt & dirt & dog food on the floor!

The only unfortunate thing about this is that we had to raise our coat rack so that we weren't constantly shutting the sleeves in the doors.

It's pretty high now, but thankfully we're both tall and can handle it, even if I do sometimes have to stand on my tippy toes!

If you or your husband likes to build, go on over to ana-white.com and check out all of the cool and FREE plans that she has to offer. You won't regret it! (I linked up on Ana's brag blog too. Check out all of the great projects that people have made with her plans here.)