Ever notice how every SINGLE food blogger has a beautiful, organized, clean kitchen?

Only mine isn’t.

Seriously.

I’m cringing as I write this, but I am going to show you PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE.

I don’t live in a really nice house with a super fancy kitchen.

Nope… more along the lines of a rented double-wide with a seriously mis-designed kitchen.  And… not to mention my complete lack of organizational skills.

Why would I do this?

Because I finally got my spice rack organized, and it is a big huge deal to me.

You see, my main grocery store has a super incredible bulk food section and I buy most of my spices there.

So naturally, I just end up with piles and piles of little plastic baggies of spices, usually more than what will fit in the little jar (if I even have a jar).  That particular side of my stove is a huge major eyesore.

I’ll Show You Mine…

Wanna see it?  This is so embarrassing… but hey, I bet it will make you feel better about YOUR spice rack!

 

Okay… 3.  2.  1.  Here goes!

 

Messy Spice Rack

Awful, isn’t it!

This is like watching a trainwreck.

Here’s another. 

Yeah… I’m seriously blushing because I KNOW you are thinking “Holy cow Bethany, you are a nutcase!”

So anyway – here’s the deal.  We go through a ton of peanut butter in our house, and I generally buy Adams brand.  They come in these nice glass jars that are super duper handy for lots of different things.  Except, they kinda tend to accumulate.

By the time I got to have one entire drawer full of them in my kitchen, I was trying to think of something I could use them for.

And THEN the miracle happened… I happened across this blog post from the Painted Hive pinned on Pinterest (picture belongs to Painted Hive)

The Solution

What a gorgeous idea!  I even tested my jars and they fit perfectly in my spice rack.

…Except I kept waiting for the money to splurge on some awesome clear labeling paper and it somehow never materialized.

Not only that, but even when I removed the labels from the jars, there was a ton of gummy residue left on that was realllly difficult to take off.

So I kept collecting the jars and then one day I was sitting in the kitchen so frustrated with my stupid lack-of-organization with my spices that I decided to just jury-rig it and do them Bethany-style.

Bethany-style means a little imperfect, pretty cheap, and very practical.  Generally decent, not the most beautiful, but good enough.

And this is what I came up with!

Bethany-Style Labeled Spice Jars

The labels are just simple labels, printed onto regular old computer paper (three to a sheet), and I used a glue stick to glue the labels.

They do the job – nice and even looking, clear to read and easily replaceable.

I just figured out how many jars I could fit (16), made a list of my top 16 spices, and the rest went into a cupboard in a box.

The only problem is that colorful spices DO get the labels stained.  Oh, and when I was designing the labels I tried to anticipate the margins but calculated them wrong so the middle label is a little shorter.

I compensated for that when I cut them apart, but the end result is that the printing is misaligned.  Again… Bethany-style :)

Let’s Recap:

Download the Files

So – I figured I’d put them up here just in case anybody wanted to do something similar with THEIR Adams peanut butter jars, so here’s a zip file with all the labels that I made.

I also included a link with the original (editable) file in case you wanted to modify it – I used GIMP so it’s an XCF file.

Click here to download the file
Click here to download the .xcf (Gimp) file for customizing

Enjoy!  And don’t laugh at me TOO much :)

So – do YOU have a messy spot in your kitchen?  TELL ME ALL ABOUT IT!

Seriously… comment and tell me about it.  Let’s co-miserate, shall we?

This post was shared at Rural Thursday Blog Hop, Simple Lives Thursday, Little House DIY Friday Linky, The Morristribe’s Homesteader Blog Carnival, Homestead Barn Hop.

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