foodgoblin: Spice Storage Makeover

Before

I've been busy basically this entire week working on this project so that is why there haven't been any new posts. Well, that might be an exaggeration since it hasn't taken up all my time but this thing has taken a week working on it bit by bit. I first saw a storage/organization idea on thekitchn.com and decided to put my twist on it--a lazier, cheaper twist of course.

The original person ordered some ungodly expensive sheet of metal online and a bunch of jars and magnets and stuck them all together to make a wall-mounted spice rack. I was certain i could find a cheaper sheet of metal and save on glass/costs by using the glass spice bottles i already own and just gluing magnets to those. It's a little on the eclectic side but it works for the purpose and it is sort of like art now.

It took a lot more effort to find a piece of metal than i had initially thought it would. My first idea was to use a magnetic white board so i went to target and bought one, only five dollars! I figured if it didn't work i'd just have a nice new magnetic white board and i'd only be out five dollars, but if it did work i had figured out a mega cheap way to do this. My concern was metal-strength, or whatever that is called, that the magnetic board wouldn't be strong enough. It wasn't. and then i left the board on the ground overnight and Orange Cat puked on it. It's fine now but you see how my life goes.

Then i visited both home depot and lowes but i neglected to think about it first (i just stopped in while nearby) and didn't bring a magneted spice jar with me to test the strength. The metal sheets looked really flimsy and overpriced for that so i decided to revisit and test if i couldn't find a better option first. I was sort of starting to panic at this point because the night before i had already glued a good amount of magnets to most of my spice jars and now they were hanging on the mini fridge in my home office, where it made no sense for them to stay if i failed to find a decent piece of metal to stick on the wall.

While looking online for some airtight food storage containers (still haven't found any that i want) i thought to check the containerstore.com for magnet boards, thinking they wouldn't be flimsy if they had any. They did! and they had a neat-looking one that was on sale, even. From 39 to 29. So david and i went over there, magneted bottle in hand and SUCCESS!! Even he liked it and he is usually resistant to my crazy money spending projects. So the next day he helped me by mounting it to the wall and ensuring it wouldn't lift off when i took a bottle off. I'm still a little iffy on the location of the board but for now it will do and maybe it will grow on me.

It would have been awesome if that was the only battle i had to go through in order to complete this project but i failed to notice that there were a couple of particular spice jars that drifted their way down the side of the mini fridge. The magnets i used were just some 5 dollar pack from walmart that i hot glued to the back. I'm pretty impulsive when it comes to things i consider super simple so again i didn't think things through when i glued the magnets on and the night i was doing this, it took me a couple of bottles before i realized just because i am gluing to a flat-backed bottle the magnets weren't automatically flat as well. So a couple of them had contact issues before i thought to press a yardstick down on the magnets to keep them in line with each other. I thought this was the case with these but even the flush ones were having trouble. And still trouble after adding a third magnet. Note to self, get stronger magnets. I only had one oops where some Spice Hunter (the brand whose bottles were just too heavy) garam masala came crashing to the ground but it made the house smell nice for a while when i vacuumed it up. I have some thinner glass bottles i can transfer that brand to when i get more magnets.

After: