Since I am fortunate enough to be able to work from home, my commute has gone from 50 miles to less than 50 feet. I always said that if I did not have to drive so far for work I would have oodles of time to accomplish a laundry list of tasks around the house. It turns out that this is only partly true. Motivation to begin these tasks is elusive, but I have capitalized on my extra time by checking off a few of the items on my list, and one of those was to organize my pantry and cupboards. My pantry is actually a small closet in a bedroom that is next to the kitchen. I built a couple of shelves and have organized the chaos as well as I can without spending a lot of money on containers and slide-out drawers.

Spices in jars

In my kitchen, I reorganized all of the cabinets save one. I really went to town on this task, moving things around wholesale. My husband laments that he will never be able to find anything now, to which I replied "now?" I can never send him to the pantry to find a can of tomatoes or a box of pasta, because we are always "out" until I go in and the box or can magically appears. But I digress. Included in the reorganization is a newly organized spice drawer, pictured above. I took inspiration from the folks at America's Test Kitchen, who provide several tips on how to organize your spices.

As you can see, I went the alphabetical route, but ATK has an interesting concept that might be even better. They suggest using five different categories:

  • Warm Spices = Yellow
  • Peppers = Red
  • Dried Herbs = Green
  • Whole Seeds = Blue
  • Miscellaneous = Orange

ATK says this works especially well when you are going to put spices in rows in a cabinet, and they add color-coded dots to the jars so they can easily spot them. They also suggest going through and checking spices for freshness. I ended up purging a few herbs that I use infrequently because they were rather lackluster.

My big splurge was for glass spice jars from Penzey's Spices that fit nicely into the drawer I am using. At first, I tried placing the jars on their sides so I could easily see the contents, but it was too difficult to pull the jars out that way, so I broke out the freezer tape and a permanent marker. It takes a bit longer to locate the spice with no visual clues, but the ease of removing and replacing the jars makes up for it. I like having consistently-sized jars rather than leaving the spices in their original containers, and it works especially well for spices purchased in bulk. What are your favorite organizing tricks?