Spring Cleaning just got spicy! See how I upgraded my spice rack and cabinet with these two simple and affordable storage solutions.
The spice rack. An aromatic,colorful, and oh-so important element to delicious cooking. But with all the different packagings and sizes of spices, organization solutions are difficult and can lead to a cluttered and confusing mess. I love to cook and my spice rack was in desperate need of some spring cleaning TLC. My goal was to make the area more uniform and organized with my spices easy to identify and find as well as making maximum use of my cabinet space. After some research on Pinterest and Amazon, my spice rack organization project was soon underway.
Step 1: Choose Your Weapons
Choose Uniform Storage
For my spices to be stored efficiently, I needed them all to be in the same size jars. And clearly labeled. I ordered this set of glass bottles and pre-printed labels from Amazon. It came with 48 glass bottles, a funnel and 300 pre-printed spice labels. Who knew there were so many spices?!?! And just in case one of your spices didn’t make the 300 list cut, there are 100 extra labels for you to customize. Can I tell you how much I love these jars? The transformation of switching out the store bought bottles with these beauties is DRASTIC, I highly recommend you get these spice jars.
Choose A Shelf
I bought this tiered expandable storage shelf from The Container Store. It is a clean and efficient organizational space saver. This rack can adjust to the full width of my cabinet (27 inches) but I chose to leave some space on the side for my everyday cooking essentials.
Step 2: How to Organize
Clear out the spice rack shelf. Toss any expired spices and wipe down the area with damp cloth or clorox wipe. I was surprised with how dirty this shelf actually was.
Transfer the Spices to Your New Bottles. This took me almost two hours to do. I highly reccomend using the funnel and doing this step over the kitchen sink. Even with the funnel and a steady hand, this part was messy. *be sure to pre-wash and dry the spice bottles before putting your spices in them
Place Spice Labels on to the Jars. I’m a bit of a perfectionist so I took my time to ensure these labels were centered and even spaced.
Alphabetize Your Spice Bottles. Yes, this seems tedious but it is the only way to find your spices and keep this space organized.
Insert the tiered rack into your cabinet and start arranging the spices. Be sure to leave room for more spices to be added to the rack, it will happen. It is important to adjust the shelf height above the top row of spices. You want to have enough room to grab and lift up the spice jar without hitting the shelf above it.
I am very happy with how my spice rack organization project turned out. Who knew two small changes could make such a dramatic difference? And the best part is that this space is now so user-friendly. Anyone can open that cabinet and easily find the spice they are looking for. And I am confident it will stay this organized in the future!!
