I’m always preaching about the Organizational Triangle, which dictates that one should group all similar items together and make sure they have a designated storage space. There are few item categories in your home that you probably naturally do this with—your spices and other cooking and baking ingredients likely being one of them.
Even if you’re already storing all of these spices together in a specific cupboard, it’s still probably not very organized—and that’s because there’s simply so much and it’s been acquired little by little, which makes it easy for the disorganization to creep up on you.
First, consider decanting your spices
In addition to preaching the Triangle gospel, I’m also a big fan of decanting store-bought items and putting them into more uniform containers. Not only does this look nice, but it makes everything fit together better, since similarly sized vessels can be stacked or sat next to each other with ease.
Consider a set like this, which has 24 identical bottles, plus labels, so all your spices and herbs look more uniform.
Next, your spices need to be accessible
Whether you decant them and put them into more uniform containers or not, your spices need to be accessible and easy to manage. Nothing is more annoying than having to take a bunch of bottles out just to reach one in the back. When your counters are already full while you prep for dinner, it’s a compounding nightmare.
First, consider a pull-out rack that can help you avoid that altogether. You just yank the rack along its track and it pops right out of the cupboard, giving you easy access to every jar, even the ones in the back.
Depending on your preferences, you may want to get a tiered organizer that will lift the ones in the back up above the ones in the front. The benefit of going with this option over a pull-out rack is that you can see all your spices at once, so you know exactly what you have.
Lazy Susans or turntables are also always a great idea. I use them to organize basically everything in my home, but their most common purpose is to organize spices, so why not go back to basics here? The one below has two tiers perfect for smaller containers, plus an open middle section that can organize your larger bottles, like your cooking oil.
If you’re starting from scratch, your best bet might be a one-stop-shop kind of deal, like this spinner that comes with 20 decanting jars and 386 labels. This one is pretty tall, so it might not fit in your cabinet, but it’s pretty enough that it could sit right on the countertop.
If you’re adamant about getting everything stuffed into one cupboard, look into the Spicy Shelf instead. It’s an adjustable, expandable shelving unit that fits into your cabinet once you remove the existing shelves, creating space for every size of jar around the perimeter of the unit and leaving space in the middle. With this, you can see every single jar and bottle at all times, plus still have room in the center for larger bottles.