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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.