In every apartment and home I’ve lived in (5 places in the past 9 years!), I have struggled with an easy, effective way to store spices. They’re so tricky – they come in all different types of containers, in different sizes, and there are a LOT of different spices you need to make recipes. Through my different homes, I’ve had cabinets dedicated to spices, I’ve put them on a shelf in the pantry, I used a drawer once…all of them weren’t ideal for my situation. Especially in my current home, my cabinet and drawer space is VERY limited and I hated using that space for spices. I started brainstorming what type of solution I needed and came up with three main principles:
- Visibility. I needed to see each spice clearly so I didn’t re-purchase one I already had, think I had one on hand that I ran out of, and utilize them more (I was tending to grab the spices at the front that were easily accessible and forgetting the ones at the back).
- Accessibility. I desired a spot where I could easily take a spice out and put it back. No more fumbling through a cabinet or drawer…I wanted a spot for each one.
- Pretty. I wanted it to fit in with my kitchen aesthetic and be practical but also pretty. Maybe it’s just me but I think the colors and textures of different spices are STUNNING so I wanted to bring that to life in my kitchen and really show the spices vs. the jars/containers/labels. I thought of this as using the wall for spice ‘art.’
I initially started searching for a wall mount and I just couldn’t find something that met all three goals and worked for my small wall so I decided to create my own solution. I found small metal racks on Amazon (they came in a set of 3 – affiliate link here) and found spice jars on Amazon that were customizable to my needs and would fit in the racks (affiliate link here). I purposely chose spice jars that were mostly clear with clear labels because I wanted the spices and the colors to really show. In other words, I didn’t want the labels to be the visual, I thought it would be really neat to have the spices as ‘art’ on the wall. That being said, there are a ton of really pretty spice jars with great labels on amazon so I would recommend just checking the measurements to make sure they fit into the rack and see how many can fit in one row.
After that, everything fell into place! I hung the racks, transferred all spices from their existing jars into the new ones and labeled everything (this process for my type A self was so satisfying).
I now have (in my opinion) a perfect spice display that is extremely functional and also very pretty. Let me know what you think! I would also love to hear if you’ve come up with other solutions for small kitchens in need of more storage – let me know in the comments!
-LL
Little Libbie 
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