June 04, 2022

A Saturday Transformation

I prepared a recipe for my vegan recipe review, but I am planning to make something much more interesting later today, so I think I'll hold off on that post until tomorrow. I'm hoping it works out!

Instead, I'll just share a few pictures of a small project I worked on this morning. For Mother's Day, I got a whole set of matching spice jars--yes, after I'd washed and reused a ton of jars I had!--and I loved them so much I got my mom a set, too. And I told her that I would go over to her house and transfer her spices over.

This is my own "before" and then after I transferred everything to the spice jar set:


I hope my mom doesn't mind my saying so, but hers looked even worse than mine, hahaha. She had some spices in old pill bottles and lots of assorted little containers. (Better than having pantry moths!)

Naturally, I forgot to take a picture before I started pulling things out, but this is the cupboard and drawer after I took the spices from the shelf insert (bottom left).


I spread all of the spices on the table. I found with my own spices that I had a lot more than I thought I did. I think the same thing happened with my mom's spices--it didn't look like that much until they were all grouped on the table.


I grabbed some jars and labels, turned on a podcast, and got to work. I find doing organizational stuff like this to be fun--maybe that's odd, but it's so satisfying to see the end result! I put all of the spices into jars, labeled them, and condensed down the ones I could (I think everyone winds up with doubles of certain spices because when grocery shopping, you can't remember if you already have it. One time, I somehow wound up with three Sam's Club-sized containers of cinnamon--yikes.)

A few hours later, my mom's spice drawer was completely transformed!


Doesn't it look awesome? Here is a before and after:


I managed to fit all of her spices in the drawer, so I put the envelopes of taco seasoning and things like that in the cupboard above. The jars came with TONS of labels--I didn't need to make a single label for my spices! But my mom had several seasoning blends, so I used the blank round labels to mark those ones.

If anyone is looking for spice jars, these are the ones I bought on Amazon. (Affiliate link disclosure--if you happen to buy through that link, I may get a small commission.) I bought the pack that has 66 jars for $40, and the labels come with them. They have smaller packs of jars, but I figured if I didn't need them for spices, I could use them in the garage for little screws and things like that. 

There are a lot of sets that have a plastic flip-top lids, but with the pantry moths, I didn't want to risk it. I actually found a pantry moth larva in the onion powder! I don't think the flip-top lid was closed tightly enough. So, I ended up choosing jars with the aluminum lids. I'm really happy with them!

My mom was thrilled with her spice drawer makeover, and I loved doing it!

4 comments:

  1. Do you label the jars with the expiration date before you get rid of the original container?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hahaha! Why didn't I think of that?! I'm sure I'll go through most of the spices before they expire. Some of them I use very rarely, though, so I'll just have to keep an eye on them.

      Something else I wish I'd done when organizing my pantry is to write down how long each pasta needs to cook. I transferred them from their boxes to airtight containers and I labeled the containers; I wish I'd included the cook time!

      Delete
  2. Looks great. I really need to do this for my spices.

    ReplyDelete

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