I started this project of organizing my spice jars this time last year! EVERYONE was Marie Kondo-ing their homes and I was getting fed up with my kitchen cabinets. I was always looking for a spice that seemed to be hiding and they were disorganized and a pain to get to while I was cooking. I decided it was time to organize my spice jars.

This is the spice cabinet pre-jarred life. They were running-a-muck of my cooking journeys and I needed to sort things out. So I got these jars from Ikea. I washed  and labeled them using this printable I made. But the printable is specific to the spices I have and I found a better system. I will get to that soon.

At first I had the spices like this and I was going to build a little spice shelf so the jars weren’t sitting directly on top of each other. Since I had a newborn at this time building a whole unique spice shelving unit was a tiny bit complicated. So I ditched this upper cabinet spice jar stacked situation and moved to putting them into some drawers instead. Which has been the best decision but it did take me some time to get to this realization. The hand-written labels were always meant to be place holders until I decided how I wanted to label the jars.

Looking good! I like the ease of pulling open the drawer and reading the tops of the jars. Now I needed to change the labels from the side to the top for easy readability. This is where I tried to step up the look of the label with my handmade printable.

Unfortunately, the labels were not lasting very long. They were rubbing against the top of the drawer every time I opened or closed the drawer. So I needed something more durable. I had this label maker and started to use it when I would run out of a spice and had to replenish it. Slowly I will do this to all the spices. I actually like the look of this better. The labels are easier to read and not getting as scratched up. Plus they look cool… right?

This is what my drawer looks like a year later. We have baby bottles galore where the  spices originally lived. Which soon we will be transitioning Hue from bottles to sippy cups so that shelf will change again. I feel like my spices are constantly getting organized because I either run out of a spice and need to re-fill or I need to add a new spice in general. It’s an area that is constantly getting re-worked because of the constant use of spices. I cook a lot in normal times but now that we are sheltering in place I cook constantly so these spices are getting a true workout.

I feel like during quarantine we are all re-organizing something in our home. It’s a good time to take stock of what we have.