Hi.
I’m Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and on-line program, and today we
are going to talk 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 and they make a lot of jokes about that.
So the answer is no, I actually don’t alphabetize my spices, and I’m going to tell you why
in a minute.
I have four steps for you today in how to organize your spices the right way for your
situation.
Step one, you want to decide what to keep.
You might be very surprised how old some of your spices are, so get realistic with that,
know that if they are too old, [POP] they are no longer useful or flavorful.
So pare that down so you can see exactly what you have to work with.
Step two, you want to decide on your strategy.
So, again, alphabetizing, yes, that is one of the strategies you can choose.
And if you really like that idea, please go ahead and do that.
What I like to do though is split up my spices between cooking and baking.
So I split them up by function.
So savory spices that I use in cooking, such as turmeric and paprika and basil, I put those
together near my stove.
And then I have another set of spices that are for baking, like cinnamon, nutmeg, baking
powder, things like that, I have in another area near my mixing bowls.
So think about what makes the most sense to you and how you cook and make that decision,
and then you’re going to go to step three, which is decide on your storage space.
So the best storage space is often, you know, of course, the point of use.
So we talk about this in other areas of the house too.
Putting things close to where you’re going to use them.
It makes common sense.
So if you’re going to have cooking spices, you might have them in the cabinet next to
your stove, like I have them here.
If you’re going to be baking a lot, you might put those spices near where your mixing
bowls are, just like I was talking about.
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 and their other cabinets.
There are special situations, so decide on that storage space, and then your next step
is step four, deciding on the storage products that you’re going to use.
This is where it gets a little confusing and you can kind of fall for some of the gimmicks,
and I want to help you out a little bit with that.
I really prefer turntables, otherwise known as Lazy Susan’s, so I can just spin this
around and quickly make a choice, and that’s why I don’t need to have it alphabetically,
because just in a few seconds I can see what I have and make a choice.
Again, the goal of organizing anything is visibility.
So 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, because of the way your storage space works,
then by all means 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.
That is a very important thing to keep in mind in any project that you’re doing.
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 and you also tend to knock
down a lot of things trying to get to the ones in the back.
And also you might get caught in the trap of buying some spice racks that have really
beautiful matching containers that you are supposed to then take the original container
and dump the spice into this pretty container and keep them all together, and I’ve got
to say, that’s the last thing I want to do when I get home from the grocery store,
is pour little spices into little containers.
So 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.
And 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
seven days a week.
You can check that out, again, at clutterdiet.com/learnmore, and we’d love to see you there.
See you next time, and may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.