As you can see, my entryway is so tiny that there’s barely enough room for the door to open. 

My apartment is a “shoes off” zone and I clearly didn’t have any space to store my shoes by the front door. To make space for that, I incorporated some shelves for shoes in the piece of furniture I designed to cover up the A/C unit  (in case you’re wondering, the cane webbing panel comes off when I need to use the A/C).

That’s been really useful, but living in LA, I’m always wearing sandals or flip flops and I just didn’t have enough room for that and my shoes. The solution came by accident during my office makeover: I had gotten magazine holders for my office, but they didn’t end up working out. I wasn’t sure what to do with them until I realized that they were the perfect width and height to fit on the side of my A/C unit cover! 

All it took were a couple of nails to secure them to the piece of furniture.

It’s not a lot of storage, but it’s enough to make a huge difference: being able to have all those sandals and flip flops stored together, and off the floor, keeps visual clutter at a minimum and everything is easily accessible, right where I need it.  You’ll see that I also snuck some shoe storage on the right, on the bottom shelf of the side table. I like that it’s tucked away so you don’t really see it, but easily accessible right by the front door.

That was only one of many projects that I did to transform this corner of my apartment and you can see the whole process in this video: