Thursday, November 29, 2012

SPICY....

I have mentioned in previous posts what limited space we had in our last kitchen.....quite a big change from our new kitchen......have I told you before how much I LOVE our new kitchen?  I have so much space now its ridiculous but somehow I keep looking for places to put odds and ends that just don't seem to fit in any particular place.  Spices always seem to be a big challenge.  Initially I tried using the drawer next to the stove but that didn't seem very convenient and some jars were too large to fit.  Then I tried the cabinet next to the stove but then I found my self constantly pawing through everything and making a mess just to find the right spice.  So of course my next step was the lazy Susan which was also a failure in multiple ways.  So I reverted back to what we did in our old house and it has been awesome!   I was very hesitant to put holes in our doors but honestly this system has worked very well for us now in two homes so I thought I should share.  We bought one of those attached to the door storage shelves you can purchase at any big box store and  filled it to the brim with all our spices.  It also holds can goods, bottles of sauces, wines...whatever you need very well.  Its extremely durable and secure.  The nice thing is there are multiple sizes of the shelves so you could buy smaller ones or larger ones to fulfill your needs and place however many you need/want on the door and various heights to fit the items you want to store.  We just like using this size since it holds just about anything and gives us the exact amount of space we need to hold the giant amount of spices we use.  
One last note on our pantry, we also put a small hook on the inside of our pantry wall to store some aprons and such.  I have a lot of aprons for myself and the kids but you would never know unless you really looked in the pantry.  They stay neatly tucked away and I never find myself fighting to get to them or struggling to get things stored near them....its been another small thing thats made a big difference in our kitchen uses/needs.
So below are some pictures displaying our spice shelves and our apron hook.  Hope perhaps these ideas will help some of you with your spice storage dilemmas. 





 So I can also tell you my husband has been VERY busy the last week or so working on some projects.  He has painted yet another room that I LOVE how it has turned out, and I'll give you a photo hint of the other project which we will be revealing very soon.....can you guess what or where it is?