Spicing Things up in the Kitchen

Guest Blogger Stephanie Buttrill is a vice president at Ketchum, the public relations agency for FedEx Office. Like many New Yorkers, Stephanie is a long-term apartment dweller. With such limited space – and very few cabinets – organization is a must!

My husband and I bought our first apartment together almost three years ago. We were young(er) and starry eyed about the whole thing – like many young couples are when diving into the real estate market. Looking back on it now, there are so many things we didn’t notice about the home we settled into that make us batty now. Most of these happen to be in the kitchen…

Take, for example, the fact that none of our kitchen cabinet doors match.

 

Or the fact that we have only ONE teeny, tiny, miniscule drawer in the entire kitchen.

And how about the fact that our plaster walls are so old and difficult to hang anything on that we just left up the message board that the previous owner left behind? 

We’re literally too scared to put anything in its place, for fear the finicky wall will reject the transplanted décor, leaving it in pieces on the tile floor. (And yes, this has happened to us in other rooms, so our fear is warranted!)

So you can imagine – in a kitchen with so many design and functionality challenges – that I’m always on the lookout for ways I can improve what I do have to work with. In this case, it’s how I organize our massive collection of spices and seasonings. Because of our wall situation, a spice rack wasn’t an option. And our limited counter space leaves those on-the-counter rotating models out as well. Before I started this project, things looked like this:

 

Yep, a mess of jars and packets that my husband and I had to sort through every time we went to work cooking up something tasty in the kitchen. Things we wanted were inevitably buried, and there was no rhyme or reason as to what went where.

Then I had an epiphany. If only I could sort things out using the same kind of organizational tools I use in my closets and drawers (boxes, separators, labels, oh my!) then my spice challenges may be solved. And I’ll have won at least one battle with my kitchen!

So here it is – my redesigned spice shelf. 

You can see we found short metal baskets to separate baking spices from meat seasonings, and all of those from Italian or Mexican cooking ingredients. This moring I also whipped up up a quick and easy label that I had  laminated and will tie on to each bin with some pretty ribbon. You can download my template here and swap out the colors and words with whatever works best for you. You can get the idea with these pictures:

Hopefully keeping everything labled and sorted speeds things up a lot when we cook – and it looks so much nicer. We could also make custom labels printed on sticky paper to better identify blends that we made ourselves or seasonings we transferred from large jars into something a little smaller. But that's a project for next time!

Hope you liked my project, and if you can relate to my “tiny kitchen pain” let me hear it in the comments section below! 


Related FedEx Office Solutions: Copy and Printing Services, Labels, Lamination
 

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•