How Do You Organize Your Spices?

This past January, I was obsessed with trying to organize our spices.  What a huge  mess...we have several teeny-tiny bottles from  McCormick's.   Ground ginger, ground allspice (don't know how that one got there), ground cloves, just to name a few.  Then there are several medium sized ones from Target--they have such cute jars (I bought these).  Here we have rosemary, dill weed, parsley,etc.   Then there are a few big spice jars from Publix--nutmeg, red pepper, cayenne pepper (of course we have that one I'm married to a Cajun) and a huge ground cinnamon (Hubby must have bought that one).  Enough cinnamon to last five years, after all, we only do our cinnamon-pumpkin dish once a year (see Thanks Ina! ). The point here is there is absolutely no order and it's driving me crazy!

I'm familiar with the spice rules, and everything I have is properly dated. Most are no more than eighteen months old which is from about the time we bought our house. When I moved from Nashville to Atlanta, I gave all of our spices over to my neighbor, Sandy.  Whewww...did she hit it big!   Reminds me of several, years ago...I got to house sit for friends of the in-laws. Their movers took off and left their a collection of spices. Too bad for them, but guess who got them?  Below Two-Tier Revolving spice Rack from Williams - Sonoma.

Anyway, when I met my friends for lunch this past January, this was my first probing question to them, "How Do Your Organize Your Spices?" Not "How was Your Christmas" or "How was Your New Years?" or "How's Your Life?" for that matter.   I really wanted to know how  they organized their spices. I heard conflicting reports. And to tell you the truth,  none of them were all that thrilled with how they organized them.  I did discover that there is spice store in Sandy Springs where you can buy your spices separately, and then store them in your own containers. This really threw me for a loop...now I was really confused as to what to do!  Below is a set from Williams Sonoma that I love.

 I read in Real Simple how you should store your spices in a drawer away from the stove. I don't have a drawer to give up due to space so they have to go in my small pantry, but this is the idea.

So one cold January Friday I was explaining my weekend wintery tasks to Gwen from work about my spice dilemma.  I told her about all my choices with buying fresh spices and storing them in  new cute containers, or just buying a spice rack with the spices already included. As I was leaning toward taking the easy way out  and just getting the spice racks with spices included. She said, "How do you know how long the spice rack been there in the store".  As such, this option got thrown to the wayside! Below is a Revolving Spice Rack from Crate & Barrel.

 

How Do You Organize Your Spices?