It had been 5 months since I last posted here. After spending 2 months renovating my new home, I used 3 months to settle in — and made several improvements. I would like to share one such "innovation" of mine.
My new 2-room HDB flat is pretty small, with about 45 square metres, and space is a luxury. For this reason, I tried to conceal many things in the house without adding unnecessarily furniture. Shoe rack is one of those things that I need but do not have a space for it near my main door — except outside the door, which I chose not to. I am not keen to have an unsightly shoe rack in my living room either.
Fortunately, there is this little compartment with 4 white doors, which houses the electrical switchboard behind the upper doors. It is just 1 metre from my main door.
The bottom of the compartment was empty. This would be where I want my shoe rack to be. And hidden. But the size of the compartment was too small for any off-the-shelf shoe racks to fit in. It took me a couple of months before I found a workable solution — using pegboards.
Read on and see how I used pegboards to make my hidden shoe cabinet.
The affordable pegboard was from IKEA, so I bought two 56cm x 56cm SKÅDIS brown-coloured pegboards that could fit into the narrow compartment. Each pegboard came with a metal bar for fixing to a wall but the electrical compartment houses cables, so I chose not to drill on the inner wall for the mounting. Instead, I used the two metal bars to secure the two pegboards together.
In addition, I used a drawstring (recycled from a torn sling bag) to tie the pegboards in place. Then I mounted the assembled board inside the compartment, letting it stood on the floor.
But it could fall forward without any support.
Luckily, I had two plastic brackets (recycled from RAFFIG finials for curtain rods) that I pasted to the floor with double-side tape to hold the bottom part of the board in place.
Next, I cut out two segments from a cardboard rod (recycled from a roll of plastic wrapper) for making the supports at the top part of the board.
To keep the rods in place, I fitted two screws (came with the pegboards) in two holes.
The other ends of the rods would rest on the back of a wooden bar in the middle of the compartment with some double-side tapes. See photo below for how the top supporting structure looked like.
And I completed my hidden shoe cabinet with elastic strings for securing the shoes. Threw in some deodouriser and scent gel and they would get rid of unwanted smell. Of course, I washed my shoes regularly too.
This solution is easy, right? And the pegboards and accessories costs me just around S$50. The rest were recycled materials.
By the way, only white pegboards were available in Singapore IKEA. I went over to Johor Bahru's IKEA to get the brown ones (and cheaper) since white would easily be dirtied by the shoes.
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