Shoes

At our old apartment, we had this big shoe rack for our (her) massive collection of shoes:

Cue appropriate Youtube video below.  (Suggest playing in background while reading the rest of this)

The entryway to our new place is a hallway with a closet on one side.  The hallway would be too cramped with the shoe rack in it, and the closet was too narrow for it to fit inside.  This was good news, as I was looking for my first carpentry project: a 3-drawer shoe cabinet.

After careful measuring of the space, I scribbled up some plans, bought a sheet of plywood, and made a stack of smaller pieces of plywood:

Also used some 2x6's to make the base:

Used this big fat blade, called a dado blade, to cut the grooves so the pieces would fit together:

Mocked everything up before painting:

Time for paint:

Apparently Cookie did some snooping:

Final assembly of drawers:

Putting everything together (by lantern light):

Astute readers may notice the gap between the side pieces and the walls.  That was done on purpose because most walls, these included, are not square, so simply fixing the panels straight to the wall would have made a crooked cabinet.  I cut shim pieces to go between the wall and the panels and put screws through.  

Drawer tracks were installed and the finished drawers slid right in.  Added some trim pieces around the sides and finished my first woodworking project:

Cookie does some quality control:

Bought a shelf and clothes rod and now we've got a fully functioning hall storage closet:

**EDIT**

And as requested by Lechers... SHOES!!!

And although the cabinet can fit three-rows-deep of shoes per drawer, we still ended up with an overflow area.

LET'S GET SOME SHOES!