January Organization Project --Spices

When January rolls around I usually get in this mood to really start organizing, cleaning and decluttering.   I guess there is a feeling that I just want a new, fresh start for the New Year.  One morning this past month,  I woke up early and noticed that my spices were practically falling out of the cupboard over the stove.  It drove me crazy enough to just immediately begin embarking on a makeover for my spice cabinets.  You see, I have spices in two places.  One is a turn-style spice rack that we received for our wedding.



But, notice how old and caked with dirt it had become!

 The other place is in the small cupboard space, which had become overly-crowded,  over the stove-top.

I like cooking a lot and so I have quite a few spices.  The problem was that some had gotten WAY too old and yucky and were taking up space for no reason.  Can you believe that I had some in that spice rack that I had never used since we got it on our wedding day. Here is one which expired way back in 2007!



Well, let's just say that we aren't newlyweds anymore. So, that tells you that many of these spices were way overdated! So, it was time to say, "Out with the old!" and "Make room for the new!"  But, of course, when it comes to our marriage, it just keeps growing better with time!  No time like the present to spice up your life!  So, this project got me excited to do just that!

  I found some duplicate spices, which I managed to combine into just one container.



 I got rid of the old, dried out spices and replaced them with new, fresh spices.

In some cases, if there were spices that I almost never used, I just got rid of them and decided to re-purpose the bottle for use of a more frequently used spice.  In that case, I decided to use my label maker to print a blank label and then use a fine point marker to try to write the name of the new spice so that it would look similar to the original font used on all of the other bottles in the spice rack.

 

 

And, in some cases, the bottles just needed a really good cleaning out before putting new spices in them.

And then there was the bottom of the plastic container I used to store my extra spices in over the stove top.  I couldn't believe how dirty that had become with such an assortment of various spices caked on the bottom of it!  Here is the before and after...

 

And here is what it looked like after clearing out lots of old spice bottles.

Here are the last stages of cleaning up my spice rack.

 

 

 

 What kinds of organizational projects have you either started or are you thinking of tackling this year?  May 2016 be a wonderful year with great new starts for us all!