Dollar Store Crafts Part 3 of 4- Shoe trays

I’m crazy about Dollar Store cookie sheets. I’ve used them for a dinner board, an art gallery, and now for shoe trays! I wonder what else I could make with these!

I have a smallish cape, with a teeny tiny side entry that also doubles as a death trap. Seriously. It’s a 3 x 3 foot area with open steps down to my (unfinished) basement. Many a person has fallen down the death trap stairs and I hold my breath every time I try to get my brood inside the house, shoes off and up the three steps into the kitchen safely. Because of this chaos, we tend to chuck our shoes down the stairs and they scatter in every direction, or end up in a giant mismatched pile at the bottom of the stairs. Sometimes, against all logic, we leave them in the microscopic mudroom, which doesn’t help the situation at all.

I am trying my best to create organized areas for everything in our house since we are so messy our shoes, so we can have all nine square feet to stand in the micro mudroom and can easily retrieve PAIRS of shoes when we are headed out the door.

I cut some scrapbook paper to fit the trays and mod podged it to the cookie sheet. While the mod podge was still wet, I glued gem stones (also a Dollar Tree item!) down with just regular sticky tak glue in a design that had my childrens’ first initial.

It holds about 3-ish pairs of shoes, which is perfect for my crew in the summer. Sneakers, sandals, and crocs. Sometimes rain boots. I try to keep the shoes out that I know they will wear, and I toss the sandals in a nearby bin with the rest of the family’s.  My favorite part about the whole project is that both of my children now know where their “shoe tray” is and can follow instructions to put their shoes there or retrieve them from there. It’s also nice to have a specific area to keep the shoes contained to, instead of them eventually overtaking the basement.

Our new routine coming in through the death trap side door is to come in, shoes off, and then one person brings the shoes down to the basement and puts them away.

Cost breakdown:

Cookie Sheets             $2

gemstones                      4

Total                               $6

Ahhh… less chaos. Always working on that!