DIY: Additional shelving in cupboard

With the floors pretty much done, and an itch to go spend yet more money at the Bunnings conglomerate, I figured it would be time to give Tina a little present and give her the shoe cupboard she's always wanted :)

We already have a huge walk-in linen cupboard in the laundry and another one upstairs, so the one in front of the powder room at the bottom of the stairs would be ideal to convert to a shoe cupboard. We don't wear outdoor shoes inside, so this is the best location near the front door and internal garage access door for swapping over shoes.

Things needed: Measuring tape, pencil/marker, drop-saw (or jigsaw, circular saw, hand saw if that's all you have access to), eye and hearing protection, glue, nails or screws.

Anyway the standard linen cupboard has 4 shelves in it. They're about 126cm wide and 35cm deep, but the doors are slightly narrower. If you wanted to go all out, you'd figure out how to remove the shelves (peel off the little white stick-on dots hiding the screws, undo everything etc etc) but since the additional shelves would only hold a few pairs of shoes, I decided to make mini-shelves that would rest on the original shelves at each end.


You can buy melamine boards in various lengths & widths, and fortunately found some in 1200x300mm which was ideal for what I needed.

So we got 4 of those planks and a spare one to cut down into supports.


And finally reassembled everything - a little tricky without removing the original shelves, but not too hard. Held together with wood glue and nails, plenty strong enough for shoes.


And the final result? Linen cupboard converted to shoe cupboard. Plenty of space! The downlight positioned just in front of this cupboard lights it up perfectly.


Really didn't take much time - about 10 minutes to measure, 10 minutes to cut, 30 minutes to assemble and install. Difficulty 3/10 - hardest part is measuring and figuring out how to construct your shelves - whether they stand on top of the existing shelves like I've done (recommended for light loads), or whether you want them fixed like the original shelves.

Whle there, we also picked up a sample of some simple white quad to install around our floor, so if it's wide enough to cover all the gaps, we might start on that next weekend.

T&T