ArcaMax

My 52nd wedding anniversary is less than five months away. I was so lucky to find my beautiful and loving wife. In all those many years, I think we’ve had fewer than four serious arguments. I discovered years ago that it doesn’t pay to cross swords with a woman with Irish blood.

More often than not, my dear sweet wife grumbles when trying to find a particular spice bottle. She frequently laments about the random placement of the glass cylinders filled with all sorts of tasty powders, leaves, or who knows what.

I discovered long ago not to open my mouth to suggest she organize them the way she’d like to have them, so what she needs is exactly in its spot. I made that mistake and didn’t like the look of flared nostrils and wide eyes.

Fast forward to a month ago. She Who Must Be Obeyed was complaining once again about how she couldn’t find a particular jar. I knew early the following morning my 16-month-old granddaughter and I would have the kitchen to ourselves. I decided to try to organize the spices alphabetically while my soulmate was still slumbering.

Our spice cabinet is a normal 12-inch-deep wall cabinet. There are four small, shallow shelves on the back of each door. Each of these shelves holds 4 typical spice jars. There are 9 inches of shelf space in the cabinet once the doors are closed.

This is where the trouble starts. You can fit four rows of spice jars on each of the interior cabinet shelves. It’s impossible to see 75 percent of the labels.

I did my best to organize them, but my efforts were rewarded with a big bowl of grumble soup. I know my lovely wife appreciated my thoughtfulness, but truth be told, I hadn’t solved the problem.

I’ve seen slide-out spice racks and suggested those. She didn’t seem impressed. I know what she wants, and that’s the magic-wand solution. She’d prefer a genie in a bottle blink her eyes, and the labels to all the spices be visible when you open the door.

Just days ago, I saw this exact solution while visiting a friend in Southern California. He lives in his childhood home, which was built in 1911. This grand Craftsman-style home has a modest 12-foot by 12-foot kitchen. Windows, a staircase, and three doorways consume valuable wall space.

The architect or builder came up with an ingenious solution for spice storage. The void space normally hidden by plaster or drywall between two vertical wall studs was used to store spices. The finish carpenter placed 1x3 smooth trim around the opening. A face-frame door that matched the base cabinets was used to cover this enormous, shallow cavern.

There were seven shelves inside the space, but it could have been nine or 11 with little effort. I measured my spice jars, and the tallest one is less than 5 inches tall. The diameter of the spice jars is two inches. This means you can fit seven jars on each shelf if you want to place just one row per shelf.

A 6-foot-tall opening would allow you to have almost enough space for 80 spice jars. Two taller shelf spaces could be allocated for bottles or boxes that need more space.

This unused space in a normal 2x4 wall would give you 4 inches of storage depth from the back side of the drywall on the other side of the wall to the face of the drywall in your kitchen. The typical spice jar is 2 inches in diameter. You could have two rows of spices per shelf, but the back row labels would be invisible. I recommend just putting one row of jars per shelf.

You can just paint the back of the drywall and the sides of the studs if you want to go the economy route. The better solution, in my opinion, is to glue pieces of 1/4-inch-thick luan plywood to create a finished wood look inside the space. You have the room to do this.

If you’re building a custom home or remodeling your current kitchen, you can enlarge the width of this spice storage space. You can make it as wide as you want, assuming you’ll purchase a standard-sized tall cabinet door to hide the jars. A 24-inch cabinet door could cover a 23-inch-wide interior space with no problem. Imagine how many spice jars you could fit in a space 23 inches wide, 72 inches tall, and 4 inches deep!

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©2026 Tim Carter. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.