Monday, October 26, 2009

Jakt Shoe Rack


Capable of holding more than its own weight in shoes, Ikea's stackable Jakt shoe rack is a time-tested shoe storage solution. With the ease of stackability, the rack enables a user to store as many shoes as a closet can hold. The available colour options are, on average, pleasing to the eye. The durability of the product is within acceptable standards. All in all, Ikea's Jakt shoe rack will do the job it was designed to do.

Most human beings wear shoes. Unless you've undergone surgery to have both legs removed, or were born without legs, you'll probably own several pairs of shoes, and will need a place to store them. We humans evolved over the course of millions of years to have body parts in certain shapes that make the part in question amenable to its task. One of these body parts is the foot; there is an arch in the foot, capable of storing and dissipating energy, and adding a certain spring to our steps. The foot is narrow at the back, to match the size of our legs, but wider at the front to allow more surface area for out foot falls. The result is that the foot is an odd shape in all three dimensions. The garment designed to protect this body part, the shoe, must therefore also have an odd shape. As such, a large group of shoes is difficult to neatly store. Luckily your Ikea Jakt has a design to resolve these issues. Single layer shelves provide the needed storage space for your foot wear. Stackable, they can accomodate any wardrobe's pedal portion.

Jakts are available in a narrow range of colours which were deemed as "pleasing to the eye" by top Ikea colour engineers back when you could still buy these items. I think that Ikea had a thing going for bright obtrusive colours at the time, so you could get these shoe racks in colours like bright yellow, pink and olive (if I recall correctly). Most people bought the olive ones because the other colours would show dirt too readily. Regardless, there were a wide range of options to fit into whatever space-aged colour scheme you or your interior decorator desired.

Jakts aren't made of honeycomb titanium, but nobody ever accused Ikea of making heirloom quality furniture. In fact, most of their stuff has a fairly limited shelf life, especially on the lower end of their price scale. Jakts are on the lower end of the price scale, but the durability is acceptable. When under a high load, the plastic will buckle a bit, which makes stacking damned near impossible, but it's still worth a whollop.

To summarize, a Jakt shoe rack is a half decent shoe storage implement, and I don't regret living in apartment where two of them reside.

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