Shoe closet chaos - banished!

Here is what the front show closet looked like prior to the start of this project.  It was an awful mess.  You can't even get the door closed without sort of kicking the pile back and slamming the door quickly. 

The complicated piece of this project is that we are going to do this without a lot of modification to the existing closet.  For example, there is a heavy base molding running the perimeter.  The opening is tight, and the hardwood floor of the entry way runs into this space.  You can also see an access panel for the AV and phone systems of the house.  I definitely didn't want to interfere with that.

So faced with the thought that it would be nearly impossible to fit a full width cabinet past the door opening, I came up with a rather neat idea.  Each of the pieces in the divider was put together with no fasteners, and no glue.  I cut the pieces to interlock together.  Then it was a matter of thinking through which pieces could be put in past the opening and when.  The center vertical and the horizontals was tipped sideways and set in place, then the two outside uprights were slotted in to lock it all in place. Et voila!

Everything was painted white, and the uprights were coped to fit over the base molding.  Every pair of shoes shown in the above picture is now on the shelf in the lower picture.  Of course, there is now a new jumble in front of the organizer, but I can only do so much.