This was the straw that broke the camel’s back:
Four baskets randomly crammed with cooking spices.
It was my breaking point and the moment that I finally HAD to do something.
Looking around the kitchen I found these:
Hmm…small, compact, stackable, and I have tons of them from all the baby food we’ve been buying. (Right….because my reality doesn’t include puree-ing food the homemade way.)
The lids are more secure than some other brands (I tested them) and they could fall out of the cupboard without the top popping off. That was pretty much the only credential that really mattered. 
So I grabbed a roll of painter’s tape, a pen, and went to work. Two hours later I had this:
Interestingly, one full bottle of a spice fit perfectly into these little tubs. If you want a prettier look there are all kinds of lovely templates out there for spice labels which are nicer look at, but these spices are hiding in my cabinet and the system just needed to happen fast and be functional. For me, this DIY cheapie does the trick.
You can see that these go 3 deep, so there are 5 rows stacked 3 high and 3 deep. That’s 45 total spice tubs with 9 in each row.
Here’s the view of the entire cabinet.
Now those 4 baskets of chaos have turned into only one small shelf in a cabinet. When I made gingerbread cookies the day after this spice organization project, it only took me about 20 seconds to find all the spices for the recipe. That was a first for me!
Cost for the whole thing was $20 that I already spend for baby food. So it was actually a free up-cycle project!
Ahh…makes me all kinds of happy to have even this tiny space of my house completely organized.
