Our spice cabinet has been a disaster for years. It’s one of those things where if I ignored it, I wouldn’t have to think about it and deal with the work I imagined it would involved to improve.

Do you do this as well?

We had spices in different sized jars and pouches, baking ingredients, bags of tea, and unwrapped glassware from when we first moved into this house. 10 years ago (!!!).

I told you: disaster.

It was hard to find anything. I’d have to take most of the jars out just to get to the cumin. Doesn’t it look like the shelf is bowing under the weight of the peanut butter bottles on the 2nd shelf? Sigh.

I have no idea why I put baking ingredients with the spices since I have most of our baking ingredients in the pantry (another project I need to uundertake and stop ignoring).

One day recently, I was trying to find some saffron. I knew I had just bought some, but couldn’t locate it at all. I ended up taking everything out. After an hour, I found the saffron in the pantry. I don’t know why I put it there – probably because there was no room in the spice cabinet.

Things had to change.

Last weekend, I did what I thought was the impossible and organized our spice cabinet.

Here’s a step-by-step look at exactly what I did:

• https://rstyle.me/+0A4sFQqUsGIyndJPMQcjMwtook everything out of the cabinet and purged all the old spices that were too old (I still had garlic powder from a decade ago sitting in the back of the shelf)
• cleaned shelves
• lined shelves. Shelf liners protect your drawers and shelves and is easy to clean. This is one of my favorite liners – easy to use, comes in a variety of colors and sizes
• got labels. I chose these Avery Matte White Square Labels, 1.5″ x 1.5″
• I wanted an easier way to locate spices and new this bamboo expanding spice rack would be perfect and also match the new jars
• made a list of all the herbs, seasoning, and spices we had (over 80 bottles! Is this normal?)
• ordered new jars. I knew that I wanted a uniform look for our spices and loved the look of these bamboo lid glass 4 oz jars from Etsy
• created the spice labels in Word. I don’t work in Word often anymore and got frustrated trying to format all the labels (I’m so used to the drag and drop of ease of platforms like Canva and Picmonkey and having the ability to move images and text willy nilly like in Adobe Illustrator + Photoshop), but I got it done
• printed spice labels and put on jars. Unfortunately, I didn’t proof the labels before putting them on the jars and some of the text alignment is off, but I didn’t want to be wasteful and really, who cares, right?
• placed new spice racks (I bought 2) in cabinet and arranged spices – I organized everything alphabetically starting from back to front

Feel free to use my Word template below – change the names, fonts, colors. Don’t forget to proof the labels before putting them on your jars and make sure your alignment is the way you want it.

If you organize your spice cabinet, feel free to share your pics – I can’t wait to see what you’ve done: tag @brightandelevated on Instagram and use hashtag #brightandelevated.

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