Frugal Tuesday - Being Frugal Doesn't Mean Being Cheap, Just Being Smart

For a long while now I have been wanting organized spice cabinets. I am a naturally organized person and having my spices in such a jumble was frustrating. I always had to root through everything to find what I wanted and sometimes I would and up purchasing two or three of something just because I couldn't find the first one. When I cleaned my spice cabinet this spring I found three jars of cinnamon, two containers of curry as well as many other duplicates I can't remember. It was time to make a change!

Mountain Man had built two lovely small spice drawers in my kitchen and I really wanted to find some jars that would work in this space.

The only problem was, my small canning jars were just too wide, the jars needed to be tall and slender to fit properly. I looked everywhere for jars that would work. I even put an ad on our local Garage Sale Facebook page to see if anyone had jars the size I needed. Nothing. What to do? Finally a friend of mine suggested a website which sells jars of every shape and size. I was thrilled! They weren't too expensive but then when the cost of shipping was factored in, well, my frugal nature kicked in. How could I justify spending around $100 on spice jars? Seriously? This was not going to work. Mountain Man suggested if I wanted them bad enough I should just order them but I couldn't bring  myself to do it. Was I being too frugal? Was I willing to sacrifice what I really wanted just because I was trying to save some money?

I hummed and hawed over this for two weeks but finally decided I had to be smarter than this. Maybe if I just changed my way of thinking I could have the spice rack I wanted and have it not cost much money. Did I really need to use those cute little drawers for spices? Just because that was the original purpose they were created for, didn't mean I could change things. In the end that is exactly what I did. My spice drawers became my tea storage.

The my spice rack, built by Mountain Man, was created in one of my cupboard spaces. The result is much better than what I had originally wanted. It is so easy to see everything at a glance! No more missing or misplace spices!

To top it off, I mounted my measuring spoons on one of the doors. Now that is handy!

The cost for this project ended up being about $3 and that was for the labels used on the jars. The material to build it was leftover from another project and the jars were taken from my vast collection purchased for next to nothing at auctions. Lesson learned!