Now. When someone cooks often – and when many of those recipes are non-midwestern fare, one quickly amasses a very large spice collection. The keeping and storage of these spices can become quite a conundrum.  Most spice racks fit about 25 spices. At the time that I started looking into solutions for my growing collection, I had 35 spices. Why would I buy a spice rack if I couldn’t fit all of my spices?!? What would the point of that be?

After lots of searching online, I decided on these cute little tins:

Aren’t they perfect?

Why no, I did not pay $2-3 each for these (as I’ve often seen them priced). Instead, I bought them from this website for a little less than 75 cents each (though shipping sucked. a lot.)

I love the windows – and how you can see through them to the colorful/beautiful spices below.

But once I bought a BUNCH of these, I found myself in a new conundrum. How should I store them?

Ideally, I wanted a shallow shelf to hang on my wall with these lined up.

But, let me tell you, there are no shallow shelf stores. Nor are there shallow shelves that show up in the thrift stores with any sort of regularity. The obvious solution would be to build one – but I live in an apartment and I have no access to power tools. That would have definitely been a HUGE weekend project for something so simple.

I resolved myself to storing these stacked on my counter for the interim. It bothered me that they had no home… but there was nothing I could do.

And then. One day. I was driving down the road, stopped at a stoplight, smiling to myself about the Girl Scout cookies I had just bought. When suddenly – I noticed what looked like a shallow shelf leaning against the stoplight.

In a quick dash, in the frigid air, I grabbed the shallow shelf and it was mine. And quite perfect. Check it out:

Yup. I have a LOT of spices.

Which brings upon the final conundrum: Why the heck does this shelf have one leg longer than the other?

I know it’s hard to tell from the photo – but it was clearly manufactured like this – the ends are rounded and finished. I’m open to your guesses.