Small and Simple Things: The traveling bookshelf OR try, try again

This is not a glamorous, amazing before-and-after. It is a small success story of saving myself some effort and filling a need by shopping my house.

Our story begins in the hall closet, where an old bookshelf held shoes. It was a fine set-up, but the shelf pushed the vacuum over so that it was a little tricky to get it out of the closet. There was a footstool and an ironing board in there, too.

The bookshelf in its original place in the hall closet

In a moment of desperation, I removed the shoe shelf out of the hall closet and put into the living room between the chair and fireplace, so I could take the books down off the mantel. It was never meant to be a permanent solution, especially when I realized that having the books on the shelf made them fully accessible to The Girl.

Notice that there are no books on the bottom shelf. That's because my helper removed them. She's helpful like that. Notice those big feet at the bottom of the shelf. They figure into the story later.

Meanwhile, my hall closet was in desperate need of better shoe storage. My plan was to buy some wood and build some custom shelves up one side of the closet, since I couldn't find anything narrow enough to fit. For whatever reason, I thought to measure the old shoeshelf/bookshelf there. It was just right at the top (22 inches), but at the bottom, it rested on feet that made it about 2 inches too wide. Hmmmmm.... I decided to remove the feet, which took a whopping two minutes, and most of that was time spent finding the right screwdriver.

My helper checking out the shelf stability

Now it fits! Now there are 4 shelves for shoes! It is stable even without those big feet. The vacuum goes in and out with no problem, and the books from the living room have moved upstairs to the library. I'm pleased with the final result. As I said, not glamorous or pretty, but functional. I found this shelf next to my dumpster a few years ago, so it was 100% free!