That Old Bookcase? It May Be Your Dream Shoe Organizer.
Shoes present a perennial organizing headache (we’ve written several articles on how to store them). They can easily pile up in corners and on floor racks. But shelves help you organize the mess: You can see what you own, and they make it harder for you to forget about those really comfortable flats you’ve had since high school. This approach helps when you’re deciding what to wear, and it also helps you to avoid overbuying.
Closet organizer Shaniece Jones said an open-view storage setup is one she tries to emulate often in her clients’ closets. “I hear my clients always say, ‘Oh my gosh, I didn’t even know I had this,’” she recalled. “When things are up on the shelf, it feels more open.”
And while built-in shelves are lovely, they aren’t always practical or doable. Which brings me back to the bookcase — a piece of furniture that serves as a space-efficient built-in, at a fraction of the cost.
Like built-ins, bookcases provide another benefit: They maximize vertical space. Small spaces tend to be narrow, with a limited footprint (no pun intended). Most traditional shoe organizers are wider than they are tall, so they can fit under clothes racks (a bad setup for people with back pain, including me). And shoe cabinets are often shorter and wider than most bookcases, so this can limit your use of vertical space in a tiny closet.
It’s also easier to find affordable vertical bookcases that fit the bill. My Billy bookcase, for example, is 79.5 inches tall, 15 inches wide, and 11 inches deep. So it fits into my laughably small walk-in closet without overpowering it, and it costs less than $50. The Billy is similar to popular shoe-storage units, such as the ClosetMaid 10-Cube organizer (part of the brand’s stackable storage line), which we recommend. However, my Billy bookcase is taller and more affordable, and it fits more shoes, so I get more space for my buck. While ClosetMaid’s 10-Cube organizer fits 10 pairs of shoes, the Billy bookcase can fit anywhere from 12 to 24 pairs, depending on how you organize and stack the shelves (it can hold up to 31 pounds per shelf!).
