Easy Design Shoe Rack

Like most women, my girlfriend has an extensive shoe collection. However, most of them are usually scattered around on the floor in places you would rather place your feet while walking around the house. That's why I decided to make a shoe rack.

To make it a little more special, I made the 'construction' of the shoe rack out of the letters S, H, O, E, and S. If you want to know how it's made or want to make your own, just follow the steps. It took me about an afternoon to make this one.

NOTE: In this instructable I use metric dimensions (mm). The dimensions are a suggestion, you can change them to fit your needs.
The shoe rack I made can hold 8 pairs of shoes. If you need more space, you can use longer sticks and more letters.

These are the items you need to make the shoe rack:

- MDF with a total size of 300x1000mm (I used 2 pieces of 300x600). Mine was 12mm thick.
- Round wooden sticks of about 1 meter in length. Mine were 10mm in diameter.
- An (electric) hand saw. If you have access to a band saw that would be even easier, but a hand saw works just as well.
- An electric drill and a drill bit of 10mm (or 11) in diameter.
- A hand file to make the drilled holes a little bigger if needed. If you use a 11mm drill bit, you probably don't need the file.

I made my design based on the size of an A4, which I could print out myself. The attached pdf is scaled on A4. You can adjust the size to your own liking. NOTE: I used a thick font to make sure I could line up the 4 holes later. If you decide to use a different font, make sure the letters have enough 'body' to line up all 4 of the holes for the sticks!

First you need to print the letters out on paper and trace the shapes onto the pieces of MDF. Then use either a hand saw or a band saw to cut out the letters. If the edges are rough, use some sandpaper to smooth the edges.

Stack the sawn out letters on top of each other and use clamps or masking tape to fix them together temporarily. I aligned the letters with the bottoms. This way the H takes care of the stability once the rack is assembled, while all the letters touch the ground.

Mark the 4 places where you want to drill the holes. I drilled the holes parallel to ground/bottom, but you can also drill them at an angle if you want to 'hang' your shoes like in the 'floating shoe racks ' that can also be found on Instructables.

Because I used a 10mm drill bit, the 10mm sticks didn't fit into the holes. I used the hand file to file out the holes to make the sticks fit through. NOTE: you want to make sure the sticks fit through the holes, but you DON'T want to make the holes too wide! Otherwise the rack becomes unstable and would require glue or something to keep it standing.
To be sure, test the drill bit on a spare piece of MDF and test to see if the stick fits through, but doesn't 'slide' too much.

Because you want the sticks to fit tightly through the holes the assembling can be a bit annoying. I eventually found a way that worked rather well:

- Put one of the S's on one end of the sticks.
- Put the construction up right with the S on the floor.
- Slide the O on the sticks from the top. Hold both sides of the O with your hands and jiggle back and forth while pushing down until the O is halfway down the sticks. NOTE: don't push too hard! The sticks could buckle under the pressure.
- Once the O is in place, you can add either the H or the E from the same side. Make sure you line the letters up correctly!
- Add one of the S's to the end of the sticks and turn it upside down.
- Remove the 'first' S and add the H or E, depending on how you started.
- Add the final S and place the rack on the floor.

You can space out the letters at equal distances or create different spaces for smaller and larger shoes.

If you want you can use some sort of filler to smooth out the holes at the 2 ends and paint your shoe rack.

That's it! Fill the rack with your shoe collection and enjoy a nice empty floor...