home care # 1-3

Here's the first installation of my new year's resolution to fix and polish things around the house one thing and one week at a time.  You can see the list here.  I'm excited to say that we are ahead of schedule on the list.  Here are one through three for the first three weeks of January.

#1 Reorganize Spices

Since I'm majorly obsessive with organization and I hated that all my spices were in different containers and not that easy to find in the cupboard, I took these two spice racks and got to work.  I already had one of the racks and a friend happened to be getting rid of one that was just like ours.  Lucky!

I took off all the existing labels that came on the spice rack containers and relabeled with better looking labels. I tossed old spices and transferred over the ones that we like to use.  I also organized each spice in the racks alphabetically.  Much better on the eyes and much easier to find what you want when cooking.

#2 Build a Kitchen Cart

Most of the credit for this one goes to my lovely husband Ryan who's learning to be a little more handy around the house. We got the tutorial from one of my favorite blogs here. We made our cart different dimensions to fit our kitchen space.  Ryan went over to a friend's house and cut the wood, came home and treated it with a food safe wood oil and we assembled it together. 

 It has been magical having this in the kitchen, because while our kitchen is large, it didn't come with enough counter space.  Now we have a ton more with this little guy.  It kind of juts out like a kitchen peninsula.

See, it even houses our spice racks.  And you can't see it, but, having the spice racks here clears space up in the cupboards that they were in.  Win-win-win.

#3 DVD and CD Makeover

It's pretty common to not see displays of DVD and CD collections in designer home magazines and books, so I thought it was time for us to get up-to-date with this since I'm really into that kind of stuff.  

We (mostly Ryan) ditched all of the cases and put them into large scrapbooks.  Rest assured, we were able to recycle every part of the cases, we just separated all plastic from paper as we went.  We have two binders for TV on DVD, one for movies, and two for CDs.

We purchased these D-ring (fits standard scrapbooks) DVD sleeve pages in bulk and they hold 8 discs each.  So much prettier than a bunch of cases.  But it opens up a job for me to decorate the now empty shelves that housed these DVDs. 

Thanks for reading!  -Caitlin