The Mega Spice Rack!

November 20, 2012 By Leanne Vogel December 13, 2018

I’ve dreamed of an organized space to store my many spices, grains, nuts and seeds for many, many years. After months of weekend spice labeling (that I began in the old house before we moved), drilling, assembling and measuring, I have the epitome of kitchen organization… the mega spice rack!

It was quite the project from beginning to end.

I built the top shelf using 2 IKEA EKBY VALTER Brackets and a cheap piece of pine that I purchased at Home Depot. Kevin helped me to cut the pine shelf to the perfect length and then I painted everything white using Behr Premium Plus Ultra Paint.

I chose really heavy duty anchors for the top shelf so that it could hold multiple large mason jars of items like quinoa, amaranth, teff, buckwheat, quinoa flakes, rice, rice flakes, coconut sugar, almonds, and pine nuts. Everything’s easy to spot and can be in my hand in seconds. No more rifling around looking for things!

The smaller shelves are IKEA BEKVÄM Spice Racks that I also painted white. Each rack holds five 250mL mason jars or four 500mL jars. These racks were incredibly difficult to get my hands on. They didn’t have them in the Montreal IKEA and weren’t offered for online ordering. I ended up buying all of the racks they had at the Calgary store when I went to visit a couple of months ago and came home with an entire large suitcase with them.

What can I say, I was a lady on a mission.

I drew little pictures of the spices on the tops with colored Sharpie Markers but am finding that they’re wearing off with time so I think I’ll have to come up with a better solution in the coming months. Perhaps modge podge a funky label to the top?

The original plan was to do two large shelves but we ran out of space so I cleared out the glass paneled cabinet beside my new mega spice rack and converted it in a cookbook/pulses cabinet. You can find the chickpeas, black beans, lentils and wild rice in between The Vegan Table and my handy Superfoods book.

Definitely worth all of the work that went into this thing. I can see when I’m running low on things, finding what I need is a breeze, and it really adds character to an otherwise boring kitchen wall!

What DIY projects do you have on the go right now?

This entry was tagged: crafts