Grab Some Wood Scraps And Use Dave And Jenny Marrs' Creative Idea To DIY Extra Shoe Storage

When Cheree and Mark Coughenour approached Dave and Jenny Marrs about renovating their newly purchased horse ranch, they wanted a classic farmhouse without a lot of "horsey" thematic touches. The "Fixer To Fabulous" hosts gave them a few anyway, and one was a really fun boot hanger/shelf combo in the newly created mud room. It's simple and perfectly executed — a reclaimed wood shelf supported by a black metal frame, to which Dave Marrs welded 12 horseshoes that were unearthed on an adjacent property. The idea was that mud, or whatever else one might step in on a horse ranch, stops at the mud room where the family of six hang their rain boots on the way in.

Shoe racks are essential to an organized mud room. There's also storage on the shelf, of course, and the piece creates space below that naturally lends itself to catching whatever one drops in a horse ranch drop zone: coats, backpacks, anvils, that sort of thing. The space is considerable; since the smallest horseshoe is typically over 4 inches wide, a shelf sporting 12 horseshoes would be over 4 feet long. Jenny Marrs used the area below the shoe rack to make a bench and cubbies for the four Coughenour kids. You could always use the same approach for hanging coats or keeping your hats nicely organized.

Making your own boot rack is pretty straightforward. Thanks to the popular lawn game, inexpensive horseshoes are available from Amazon in various sizes and quantities. You'll need to weld the horseshoes and the frame, a simple job you can probably have done inexpensively at a local auto or machine shop. You could also adjust the design to use nuts and bolts instead of welds or possibly use a two-part epoxy. Using Shimeyao cast iron horseshoes ($23.99 for 10), either some wood scraps you already have or both of these Peter's Goods rustic floating wall shelves ($27.97), and KwikWeld steel-reinforced epoxy ($6.54), you could make a rack for a family of four for $58.50.

If you don't get your kicks from horseshoes, consider something else that matches your interests. A good place to start is the rich and ever-expanding universe of DIY coat hooks. Some ideas include rolling pins, heads of hammers and various other tools, the butt ends of fishing rods, railroad spikes, knife handles, and just about anything else long enough to hang a boot on. 

The construction itself, while fairly basic, could be made even easier by repurposing a prefab shelf or borrowing hardware from another piece, like the floating shelves mentioned above. You can also simplify the whole thing by recreating a basic version similar to this Esschert Design peg rack or this PeachyModern rack. Whatever materials and design you choose, this is one DIY that offers function and style.