Organizing My Spice Cupboard

One thing I want to do this year is to keep my kitchen more organized. I have a really small kitchen. Well, maybe not really small, but pretty small for someone who loves to cook.

These are really the only cupboards I have in my kitchen. I have a couple of drawers next to my sink and a small pantry and that is all. So, I need to be organized to fit everything I need in my kitchen.

Being organized just makes me feel better. I love to open a cupboard or drawer and see everything neatly stored. But to be honest my kitchen does not look like that and it has bothered me since we moved into our house five years ago. I love our house, but we bought it for the property, the view, and more. We did not buy it for the kitchen. So, I have spent the last five years struggling with my kitchen and how to make it work. I finally decided getting it organized was the best way to do that.

So, for far too long, this is what my spice and miscellaneous cupboard looked like.

This is the cupboard I use the most in my kitchen. I dreaded opening it up. It was so unorganized. I had trouble finding things. When I did find something I would knock three other things out of the cupboard trying to get to it. Now, I will admit I have a lot of spices and such, which is part of the problem, but I use them.

The trouble was I really did not know how to fix this cupboard and make it more usable and organized. I kept seeing spice organizers and other things, but I had not seen one that would work well for what I needed. Most of the containers are round. Round is not a good use of space. If you use round containers you end up with a lot of wasted space and I needed to maximize space. So, instead of doing anything about it, I just lived with the mess.

That was until recently. I saw a post that Mary at Owlhaven did on her spice cupboard and how she organized it. I immediately said, YES, that will work for me. It was exactly what I had been looking to do, but had not figured out how. So, I ordered some spice containers and I went to work. I was on a mission to make my cupboard look better.

I used my label maker to label all the spice containers. I love my label maker and it worked great for this project. If you love things to be organized, I highly suggest you invest in a label maker. It makes organizing so much easier.

I started by emptying the cupboard out and wiping it down. I could not believe how much I had packed in the cupboard once I had emptied out. I did end up throwing away several spices and things that were really old or I knew I would not use again. Then I set to work putting it back together and this is what my spice cupboard looks like now.

Isn’t that better. So, nice and organized. The one thing I had before and still used was the step shelf thing. I bought it a long time ago at Walmart. I have used it in three houses now and I love it. I wish I had bought several of them, because I have not seen one quite like it again. It adjusts in width, so it will fit just about any size cupboard. I love it and these containers fit perfectly on it.

I will say this project was not cheap, by the time I bought the containers and everything and then paid shipping, I spend about $50. But for me this was so worth. I will use these for a long time. I will no longer waste time trying to find things or waste money buying things that I already had, but did not know I had, because I could not find them.

I really am happy with how this turned out. Now I love opening this cupboard.

So, what do you need to organize in your kitchen?

This post linked to DIY Monday.