Building a Spice Rack

Who doesn't love spices? 

With their assortment of smells and colors, spices not only add taste to our food but they also add color to our kitchen. I mean, that is only if you have a nice way of displaying them of course. If you keep your spices hidden in the closed cabinets of your kitchen, you don't get this extra benefit. Also when they are not right in front of your eyes, you don't realize that you ran out of a particular one until you need it most. This naturally calls for a beautiful and functional spice rack that we can proudly hang in our kitchen. And what is better than building it yourself according to your available space in the kitchen? In this post, I will share with you how I built a very simple but functional space rack in my kitchen. I hope you find this post motivating if you have been pondering about having something similar in your kitchen. 

Okay, on with Step 1: get a piece of flat wooden board. I've used the following one, which is a 80cm by 40cm flat board (approximately 31.5 by 15.75 inches). This is your material list -- there is nothing else to buy other than a few screws and wood glue which may already be lying around from other projects. The exact dimensions of this lumber is not important. I chose 40cm width because it matched the horizontal space in our kitchen where I wanted to hang it.

Step 2: Cut several pieces from this main board to obtain put together the following shape:

You can see that I cut two pieces length-wise and one piece width-wise and glued them on the main board. The short piece constitutes the bottom tray of our spice rack. The longer two pieces represent the sides. You can see that the bottom piece is slightly smaller than the side pieces as this space will be filled with an extra piece to hold the spices in.

Step 3: Do the second level of the space rack. All you need to do is cut another short piece and glue it to the middle of the main board. You can then glue the front pieces that will prevent the spices from falling down:

Step 4: Drill two screw holes for hanging the rack on the wall. This is really a simple step and all you have to pay attention to is to position to holes at roughly equal spaces from the sides. Also try to drill them a little bit below from the top to avoid cracking the board. This is how it looks like in my case:

Well, that's really it. At this point you can sand the cut edges of the rack to make them smoother. As a tip, always try to hide the cut edges from the plain view -- for example glue from the cut edges instead of the untouched ones. But sometimes displaying the cut edges is inevitable and this is when sanding can make it look nice again.

If you are a naturalist, you can consider yourself done and simply hang the rack in your kitchen. But if you want to take a step further, you can paint the rack with the color of your choice. Furthermore, you can prepare yourself a stencil to write some nice text on your rack. Here is my hand-made stencil:

After painting your rack and making sure that it has fully dried, simply paste this stencil on the two trays of your rack. If you then paint it with a contrasting color and remove the stencil you will achieve an excellent pattern that will make your rack even more customized. Here is a finished look of my very own spice rack. It is not too bad, I guess:

You can see that each level takes 7 spices although I hadn't put any in the upper level when I took this picture. Depending on your available wall space, you can make a rack with 3, 4, or 5 levels and varying widths. 

And if you ask me what is the best part of this rack, I can tell you that it is the cost. I merely spent about 10 dollars for the whole project. Cool, ain't it? So please let me know what you think about this little spice rack project. I would be so happy to see your own versions of this rack if you choose to build one for your own kitchen.