Upcycled spice jars

Howdy! I'm back from my sickbed. It's amazing how much a person doesn't get done and how far we get behind when you're sick for the majority of three weeks. Now, if this nagging cough would go away...

So this week has been "catch up week" for me. You know... catching up on housework, emails, studies, and anything else that I neglected. Our house was a mess because on one of the days we thought I was over being sick, my husband and I decided to switch our bedroom with our spare room to create an office/lounge. And then I got sick again. So there was papers and books and office supplies and craft supplies and a sewing machine scattered all over the house. My poor family. But I've finally made headway and almost have everything back to normal, so much so that I finished a project I've been planning on for weeks.

I am an organization person. I LOVE to organize things and all the cute little organization boxes and tools to use. I have a several organization boards on my Pinterest and am a little obsessed with finding ways to use things I already have or can upcycle.

I found an awesome idea a few months ago about upcycling baby food jars into spice jars. I have all these different size spice jars and all my spices were incredibly messy in my cabinet and it was driving me crazy. I hate messy disorder. (I'd show you a photo of the before but it was really, really ugly. Seriously)

However, since our daughter is 7 and we don't have any friends who buy baby food, the jars were hard to come by. But I finally found some from a person in the town I used to live in who was kind enough to give me a big box of jars she had collected.
 

These are just a few of the jars she gave me.

I cleaned the jars by soaking them in very hot, soapy water.
 I then painted the lids (because I didn't like the plain ones).

See. Aren't the lids so much prettier?

After letting the lids dry, I transferred my many spices to the jars.

And I labeled them.... I am going to change the labels now that I have the right tape for my label maker. Oh, how I love my label maker. :-)

I put them in the pretty spice rack my husband bought me last year.

But it still wasn't enough. I had some spices in a counter spice rack but most of them had been used and I had duplicates in the cabinets. So I emptied the counter spice rack and put the jars with spices in them (with the same labels as the new spice jars) and put them in the cabinet to the side. You can see them at the right of the spice rack (the ones with the black lids).
Next, I transferred my baking powder and baking soda to clean drink mix containers because they were more uniform and that was the look I was going for.

See how pretty!

And since my spice shelf was so nicely organized, I just had to do the rest of my baking cabinet, right?

I took all my cake sprinkles, food colorings and flavorings and put them in a black plastic basket. Then I put my pastry bags and tips in another basket.
And then I just rearranged everything else to look nice and neat.

Ahhhh. Organization.

And that left me with an empty counter spice rack.
Hmmm. What to do, what to do.
Then I remembered an idea my husband had a few months ago, using the spice rack as a counter storage for our K-cups. Shh. Don't tell him I'm giving him credit.

And it works beautifully!

And now we can put it right next to our Keurig! Very convenient.