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01.09.2020
Spice Drawer Organization In the Kitchen

A thoughtfully organized kitchen space can do wonders for both the ease of meal preparation and frankly, your sanity. And although just a year and a half old, I look around our kitchen and can see areas I’ve essentially “let it go” (feel free to insert song here). Unchecked and unorganized spaces can quickly become nightmares. I’m talking about you spice drawer. So I’ll just organize you all up while the boys watch FROZEN for the 100th time.

It’s the current bane of my existence, the spice/herb drawer, not FROZEN the movie, although…! Like most, our drawers are just slightly bigger or slightly smaller than the spice rack organization thingies at the Container Store. However, I’ve had the plastic ones in there for the last year filled with whatever spice/herb bottle I was able to find at whichever store I was at. Trader Joes, Whole Foods, specialty spices like Penzey. You name it and it’s rolling around in there because they don’t quite fit the plastic thing perfectly and some are round whereas others are square.

THE BEFORE

SPICE BOTTLES

So I invested in these spice bottles that are ALL the same size and shape after taking inventory of what I currently had, I knew I needed about 40. There were more than that before we organized. It’s crazy how many duplicates can sneak their way in when you think you’re almost out of something.

SPICE LABELS

The spice bottle set came with 48 glass square-shaped bottles with round black labels printed with every possible spice/herb out there. I literally had to google what some of them were. It also came with a handy funnel so you can easily transfer the contents to the new bottles. Now I could have just used the labels the set came with but I ordered these nice modern ones By Jamie Jane to put on the front. I liked the modern aesthetic of the font and feel it brings to the organized drawers. She customized my labels to say either “spice” “herb” or “seasoning” depending on what classification the herb/spice/blend fell in. I also asked for the font of the spice/herb to be all the same size. I did not organize them in the drawer according to the numbers on the label. Rather I organized them based on use. My mom use to have hers organization alphabetically for instance. You do you.

My kitchen works well because I’ve created zones. For example, I’ve got all my baking stuff to the right of our range and all my cooking stuff to the left of it. The top drawer on either side of the range is mainly spices/herbs. As a result, hubby made two inserts. The baking side was a bit more complicated because I had less spices. I also needed room for measuring cups, spoons and extracts.

DIY SPICE DRAWER INSERT

He bought four pieces of standard 4 ft length Poplar wood, 1/4″ thick and 5 1/2″ wide and hobby wood that is 1 1/2″ wide by 3/4″ thick. We measured the width of our drawers and decided to carry the interior spice ramp all the way across. We also figured out how deep we wanted the interior ramp shelves, ie how much wood was showing above the spice jars. In our drawers I liked the interior “ramps” to be a little more than 4 1/2″ wide. Consequently, this left about a 1/2″ of wood showing above the spice bottle. Using wood glue, hubby glued the section of hobby wood to prop the poplar wood pieces up 1 1/2″ in the drawer.  He then glued these three “ramps” of wood together to make the finished spice rack.

I couldn’t be more excited about this quick and easy kitchen organization DIY. There’s been a few happy dances in the kitchen this last week and the process is saved under my highlights on my Instagram profile. Thank you Ruthie for capturing the joy of crossing projects off the list, Ruth Eileen Photography. Now enjoy all my friend’s organization tips below.

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