Spice Rack

My organized kitchen effort has been a slow one. I didn't have much of a game plan for the storage challenge I would be facing in my smaller than desired cooking area. Projects like revamping the lazy susan cabinet and creating a coffee corner developed after finding inspiration on pinterest MONTHS after I moved in. So needless to say, there's still quite a few organization issues I've yet to tackle.

But thanks to an early Christmas present from my mom, I was able to knock out a pretty awful one this weekend: my spice storage.

You see, I threw all of my spices and extra canned goods into a small storage bin when I moved.

Then I did nothing with it for 5 months.

Nothing.

Okay, by nothing I really mean I stored it ON TOP of my my cabinets and every time I needed something I'd lug it down. So basically, not only was it a giant pain to get to, but it was also a huge eyesore in my kitchen. Not awesome.

So I mentioned the idea of getting some kind of shelf to put everything on to my mom while I was home at Thanksgiving. And funny enough, while we were out Black Friday shopping (for stuff for ourselves, obviously) we found a shelf at TJ Maxx that would work perfectly. She bought it for me and let me take it home as an early Christmas present.

The pattern on the background didn't really go with my kitchen decor, so I decided to use some extra fabric from my kitchen curtains to cover it.

I Mod Podged the fabric on, let it dry for a couple of hours, then hung it on my wall.

I then made a HUGE MESS by digging out every single spice jar/container/bag/whatever in my possession and piled them on my kitchen table. For some reason, I had four whatevers of paprika. Oops.

Now since I was going to all this effort, I figured I might as well take it a step farther and really make it look good. And that meant matching spice jars. Without knowing how many jars I actually needed, I went ahead and ordered two dozen Libbey 4.5oz spice jars off of Amazon.

I only made a slightly bigger mess transferring all the spices into new jars.

And because I'm smart enough to think ahead, I went ahead and labeled the bottom of every jar so I'd be sure to remember what was in each.

But I still almost used ginger in place of garlic. YUCK.

So I didn't want long to get real labels on these. I decided to stick with the vinyl lettering motif I'd started in the kitchen and use my silhouette to cut out labels for each of the jars.

This makes me so unbelievably happy, you don't even know.