Organizing the Spice Cabinet

Just like when I organized the pantry, I didn't take a "before" picture - but you can KIND of see the messiness in this picture:

 

 Things don't really fit - and you can just see that it's completely disorganized (also, please ignore the dinner making mess in the picture. Thank you.)

BUT - it's not so messy anymore:

Taking a note from my pantry organizing fun, the first thing I did was pull everything out, wipe down the shelves and group items with similar things. Then I had to decide where would be logical for things to go.

My biggest issue was the spices. There were SO many and it was SO hard to find everything and nothing stayed together AND we had this huge ferris wheel type spice rack that took up a ton of room on our countertop, yet we hardly ever use most of the spices. Once I realized that I could probably do without most of those spices, I stopped everything and pulled the spice rack out.

I took out all of the spices and separated out the ones we actually use from the ones we don't. Out of 20 spices in the rack, we only used 7. So, I dumped out all the spices we don't use and washed the containers. I then took our spices and poured them into the empty containers. This helped condense a LOT - we had 5 things of cinnamon and 4 things of nutmeg and duplicates of almost all our other spices; partly from my awesome kitchen shower before we got married and partly because I ended up buying spices I didn't think we had because I couldn't locate them easily.

Now I was stuck with spices in containers with wrong labels. The first thing I tried to do was remove the printed labels, but that proved unsuccessful so I went to plan B. I grabbed some red scrapbook paper, the hot glue gun, whole puncher and some yellow ribbon and got to re-labeling our spices. I didn't do the ones that were correctly labeled - but will at some point because I really like uniformity.

Labeling problem fixed, I went on to try and figure out how to stack the spices without going out and spending $10 on a shelf thing. The scavenger hunt was a success! I found 2 identical trays that are about 1"-1.5" tall. I took out the glue gun, glued them together so that they created a stair effect and placed it on the shelf. Then I added all the spices in alphabetical order (because I'm like that). Then I added the rest of our spices that didn't make it into a container to the side of the staired shelf - putting the taller ones in back and shorter ones in front.

On the other side of the cabinet are our "everyday" items - salt and pepper shakers, salt and pepper grinders, oil, pam, toothpicks. And toward the center I put other cooking items, like chicken and beef boullion and kitchen bouquet.

On the second shelf is all baking items on the right side. Using an organizing shelf you can get at BBB or Target, I put baking spices & extracts on the bottom. Food coloring, sprinkles, cupcake liners, frosting, etc. on the top.

On the left side of the cabinet, I placed all our vitamins and stuff like that. And nothing gets put on the top shelf because the second shelf is hard enough for me to reach. :)



The most important thing to do when organizing, is to figure out what works best for YOU - it doesn't matter how I organize my cabinets, if it isn't a system that works for you then don't do it. I do suggest trying different things out though. It took me almost 2 years to figure out pantry and spice cabinet organization!

lots of pretty organized shelves and loves to you,
Sara