http://www.ClutterDiet.com Get organized with home organizing tips from professional organizers at The Clutter Diet. In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. He was looking for spices and did not find them, can you relate? In today's video Lorie Marrero is talking all about spices and how to organize spices. If your kitchen has enough spice of its own the last thing you need is to dig for your food spices. These strategies will help you store spices in your home organization plan. These Clutter Video Tips are posted frequently here on our clutterdiet organizing channel. You can search Twitter for #ClutterVideoTip also to find comments on our organizing tips. Lorie Marrero is the creator of ClutterDiet.com and the author of The Clutter Diet: The Skinny on Organizing Your Home and Taking Control of Your Life. Lorie also serves as the national spokesperson for Goodwill Industries International and ambassador of the Donate Movement.
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Hi. I'm Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book & on-line program, today we are talking about organizing your spices. This is everybody's favorite subject; when they find out I am a professional organizer they want to know if I alphabetize my spices. The answer is no, I actually don't alphabetize my spices, & I'm going to tell you why in a minute. I have 4 steps for you today in how to organize your spices.
Step 1, decide what to keep. You might be very surprised how old some of your spices are, get realistic with that, know that if they are too old, they are no longer useful or flavorful.
Step 2, decide on your strategy. Alphabetizing, is one of the strategies you can choose. & if you really like that idea, go ahead & do that. What I do is split up my spices between cooking & baking. Savory spices that I use in cooking, such as turmeric & paprika & basil, I put those together near my stove. & then I have another set of spices that are for baking, like cinnamon, nutmeg, baking powder, in another area near my mixing bowls. Think about what makes the most sense to you & how you cook & make that decision, & then you're going to go to step 3, decide on your storage space.
The best storage space is often the point of use. Putting things close to where you're going to use them. If you're going to have cooking spices, you might have them in the cabinet next to your stove. If you're baking a lot, you might put those spices near where your mixing bowls are. You also may have a dedicated storage space that is supposed to be for spices. Some people have these very fancy pull-out spice racks that are built in between their oven & their other cabinets. There are special situations, decide on that storage space, & then your next step is deciding on the storage products that you're going to use. This is where it gets a little confusing & you can kind of fall for some of the gimmicks, & I want to help you out a little bit with that.
I prefer turntables, otherwise known as Lazy Susan's, I can just spin this around & make a choice, & that's why I don't need to have it alphabetically. The goal of organizing anything is visibility. If you have visibility to it this way, then alphabetizing is just an unnecessary extra step. If the way to gain visibility is to alphabetize, then do that. Just make sure that there is a return on investment of your time if you decide to do something like alphabetize. Make sure you're not doing it just for the sake of doing it.
What I don't like for spices are the stair-step spice racks that you see that raise different levels like stadium seating in a theatre. I don't like those because the visibility is not that great & you also tend to knock down a lot of things trying to get to the ones in the back. & you might get caught in the trap of buying some spice racks that have really beautiful matching containers that you are supposed to take the original container & dump the spice into this pretty container & keep them all together, that's the last thing I want to do when I get home from the grocery store. I would rather work with a storage product that uses the original container that you purchased the spice in from the store.
Another great thing for spices actually is racks that go on the back of a door, the racks that might be on the back of your pantry or even here on the back of a cabinet. That can be great. & then if you have a drawer as your storage space, you may just use regular drawer dividers to help you divide up cooking versus baking, or just give you more visibility to those.
If you'd like some help figuring out your spices, we can help you in our Membership Program at http://www.clutterdiet.com/learnmore. You can find out how you can have a team of organizers helping you with your projects 7 days a week.
See you next time, & may you always be happy & grateful for having more than enough.
