I put in a shoe rack in this side door/basement stairs liminal space. They need some adjusting, but they don’t actually have to be level to hold shoes.
However, they do need more surface area to hold more than one pair of shoes each! I wish I had thought of this before starting. I might have done it anyway, though.
Since this area is never going to not look “off” unless we replace the door and frame and repaint, I decided to make the shelves yellow. Unpainted wood, which I like, isn’t going to look good here.
In the end, just a tiny bit of utility has been eked out. I enjoyed cutting the boards, though.