One of the things that Cary didn’t like about our kitchen was the spice cabinet. We kept our spices in a narrow cabinet above the stove. The cabinet was rather deep, and had only three shelves. The problem with keeping small spice jars here was that the smaller jars were stacked on top of each other, multiple rows deep. So finding the right spice required pulling other spices out of the cabinet.

So as my first woodworking project, I thought I’d make a spice rack for Cary. Here are the plans I drew up in Google Sketchup after talking with Cary about what she wanted in a spice rack:

This is a pretty simple design consisting of two vertical pieces of 28.75″ x 3.5″ x 1/2″ wood sides and six shelves. The bottom two shelves are 3.5″ x 1/4″ x 12″, and the rest of the shelves area more shallow 2.5″ x 1/4″ x 12″. I also used 3/16″ diameter dowel rods as a sort of “lip” at the front of the shelves, just to keep stuff from sliding off. I’m not sure what kind of wood the dowel rods are made of, but the rest of the wood is poplar.

I decided to round off the top edges of the side pieces just to make the top of the rack a bit more interesting. Here’s a close-up of the half-way decent curve I made with a jigsaw and some preliminary sanding:

I planned to take more in-progress pictures, but I don’t think they would have been very interesting. Here’s the final result:

I’ll probably get around to painting it eventually, but I don’t think it looks too bad as it is.