Spices! I love them, I love to cook with them, I loathe trying to dig the right one out of the far reaches of the back corner of my spice cupboard all while my food is burning and I’m in need of that darn cumin 5 minutes ago. Now, if I was a prepared amateur chef, I would look ahead at the recipe and get all of my necessary spices out ahead of time and I’d be ready to rock and roll at the exact time the recipe indicates to add the spices. Let’s be honest, I never do that. I’m usually juggling ten things and I wait until the very last minute to grab what I needed.

Our old kitchen was built in 1989 and every cupboard was the same. Nice and deep, several shelves, a wasteland for anything beyond the front row. When I wanted to find something in the back, I’d have to hop on the counter and hunt for it. I even ordered one of those handy spice organizers for my cupboard. Problem solved! Wrong! It wasn’t the entire depth of my cupboard, so there was still a row of tall jars behind my organizer. There is good intention behind the graduated spice organizer, however, they never accommodated all of my spices. I still had to shove everything in a small space. I’d end up buying extra spices at the store and get home, only to realized I had a jar that was 3/4 full of that exact spice. How many jars of pumpkin pie spice does one actually need? Well, I am the proud owner of 3 jars. It’s going to take a while to get through that. Pumpkin pie, anyone?

When it came time to design the new kitchen, proper spice storage was on the top of my list. I wanted to see everything front and center. No spice left behind!! I had visions of a full-height spice and oil cupboard that pulled out on one side of my new built-in fridge. Maybe even two if there was room.

This is where having good people in your corner comes into play. We met with our contractor and our cabinet maker and my dreams were squashed. Out with the monstrous spice cupboard. We’d drawn up the plans ourselves. My husband has some pretty amazing CAD skills and he was able to put our dreams down on paper. When we met with our cabinet maker, he discouraged us from even having one full-height spice rack, let alone two. His justification was that the full-height spice pull outs can have some issues with stability. I can understand that, when you get oils and vinegars and a lot of heavy glass jars on one of those, they tend to break down. That makes sense, but I have seen plenty of these lovely cupboards all over the place and they seem to work fine. The other issue was the space. We had removed two walls and completely redesigned the layout of the kitchen. Two pull-outs, let alone one, would eat up a ton of our counter space. Now, looking at the set-up and the size of our work space, we are really going to need that area for plating and prep.

With the old idea out, in came his new one. A smaller version of what we were asking for. We could tuck this one underneath the counter top next to the range and we would still have the work space. Now we’re talking. Unfortunately, it isn’t tall enough to house my soy sauce, vinegars, oils and tall bottles, but it fits all of my spices and there’s even room for more! The shelves are even adjustable if we needed to make a bit more room. This is the perfect solution for our problem. Our oils will have to find another home and that’s a-ok with me.

We haven’t even gotten the countertops on, knobs for the cupboards in or the go-ahead to move in, but I was too excited. This afternoon, I wiped down the insides of our brand new beautiful spice cupboard and I loaded it up with all of my favorite spices. I can already taste the Butter chicken!!

Hooray for organized spices!! Let’s get cooking!