DIY Pantry Door Spice Rack Hack

Let’s talk pantry storage, shall we? This is actually the first kitchen we’ve ever had that included a floor-to-ceiling style pantry within the cabinetry layout. I immediately filled those shelves with all of our go-to snacks and ingredients when we first moved in a couple of years ago, and it has worked really well, but it recently occurred to me that we had a lot of wasted space on the inside of the large pantry door itself. Wasn’t there a way for me to utilize that square footage for other kitchen items that we needed to grab day in and day out?

After only a couple of minutes spent brainstorming, the answer came to me: spices! As you can see, our spices cabinet (which was outside of the pantry within the run of upper cabinets by the stove) was completely overstuffed. Bottles were sitting on top of each other, and the tiered spice holder we bought to go in the cabinet was, for some reason, angled downward so that spices slid right off the shelves when placed there. To fix that, I stuck some stacked felt pads underneath the front of the shelf so we could use it, but it obviously wasn’t working for us in the long run. The new plan was to move our spices to the pantry door so we could see our collection more efficiently, and doing so would also free that upper cabinet by the stove to hold (a smaller-sized collection of) other ingredients.

Those photos above may give you a better sense of where our pantry is in the kitchen. The beige-colored round plastic containers that you see there installed on the inside of the pantry door as it stood before were left behind by the previous homeowners. We used them to hold odds and ends, like rice and tuna packets, but they weren’t nearly big enough to organize all of our everyday kitchen items. I knew we could do better, so, with the plan to create multiple spots for spices in mind, I ordered these metal shelves from Amazon.

The new shelves came in a pack of four (I bought two for a total of eight), and were ready to hang right away. The set included a removable plastic hanging system with hooks, but I really wanted maximum staying power for these bad boys, so I installed them more permanently with screws. I used short screws from my existing hardware stash since our pantry door is thin, but the set does come with its own screws—they were just too long for our purposes. You can see below how I installed the shelves along the back of our pantry door after removing the old beige plastic containers.

In an ideal would, I would have been able to install the shelves in a nice even column with equal distances between, but I had to install them a bit randomly in order to avoid hitting the interior pantry shelves. You see, when I closed the pantry door, I needed the shelves to fall in line either above or below the fronts of those pantry shelves so the door could close all the way. This left me with a random layout for the shelves visually, but it works just fine.

It was oh-so-satisfying to fill up those shelves with our extensive collection of spices, and I love that it allowed us to empty an entire shelf in that upper cabinet by the stove, too. I ended up moving all of our cooking oils and vinegars from the pantry to that cabinet so that we had a little more space on the pantry shelves. And I used the leftover shelves from my set of eight on the inside of the pantry wall to hold smaller snacks and on that upper cabinet door for my salt/pepper stash. Again, here’s a link to the shelves that I used. They obviously work well for spices, but I could also see them functioning really well in a bathroom for toiletries.

I realize that this isn’t the prettiest home update I’ve ever shared here on the blog, but it may just be the most functional. We love having our spices all in nice clean rows. It makes cooking so much quicker and easier, and there’s just something so wonderful about seeing and interacting with more sparsely packed shelves. Now, someone just needs to remind me to fill and repaint those holes in the back of the pantry door from where I took the old containers down…

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