Organize: Spice Cabinet

Have you gone through your spice cabinet lately? I haven’t either!! 🙂 I need to. Recently my husband mentioned the difficulty in finding spices in our little Lazy Susan. I’ve also had the pleasure of helping my dear friend clean out and reorganize her spice cabinet. So, inspiration is coming at me from all angles and here are the results.

A few days ago I stopped over at the home of one of my besties, Kayce. She had requested that I come help her declutter and reorganize. She wants to start working on some renovation projects but “stuff” is in the way. It’s going to take a little time, but I wanted to start slow with her and get some quick successes. So we worked on just three small areas of her house in the time space of a morning. One of those was her spice cabinet. Mainly because she had a new unused spice rack she hadn’t put to good use yet.

1. Empty Everything

My first step in organizing is to always empty the space you’re organizing. This is why I also have a tendency to organize one small space at a time. It’s not terribly overwhelming to empty out a cabinet or closet, compared to an entire room. I took everything out of her cabinet and set it in groups on her counter. This was sort of a step ahead of what I normally do, but more about that later.

She had already purchased this clear spice rack shelf so I placed that in the center of her cabinet. Then I started going through the spices I had unloaded.

2. Declutter and Sort

The sorting portion of this step had already partially been done. As I mentioned earlier, when I unloaded her spices I set them down in groups. The groups that naturally arose were spices for Italian cooking, spices for baking, and spices for meat and burgers. She also had a healthy collection of salts and peppers which was its own little group. We needed to declutter, so we went though each spice checking the expiration dates and the amounts in each. Some we tossed because of the expiration date, and some we consolidated before tossing the lesser spice. Needless to say, my dear Kayce will not have to buy any new spices for a while. She is set! *Giggles*

3. Organize and Make it Pretty

After all the decluttering and sorting was complete, it was time to load up that spice rack and put things back into her cabinet neatly. She also had a little vintage Lazy Susan that I wiped down to place back into her cabinet for ease of finding her spices. The new spice rack up top held all her spices for Italian cooking. The basils, oreganos, garlics, and thyme, etc.

On the Lazy Susan and shelf below I placed her baking spices, meat spices, and salts and peppers. The baking spices went on the top of the Lazy Susan, and the meat spices went on the bottom. Now, a few of the meat spice containers were too tall to fit under (and even on top of) the Lazy Susan, so I had to set them to the right. Still trying to keep them separated from the Salt-N-Pepa 😉 side on the left.

Overall, things are now cleaned out, organized, and in spots where they are easy to find and get to while she’s cooking. Now… I need to get to organizing my spice cabinet!