After just a little love...

... I have an amazing vintage spice rack.

My brother (the artist) found this spice rack at a friends family garage sale. He is in art school and he never knows when he will need something cool for an assignment. I'm not sure if he paid for the spice rack or if he simply picked it out of the would be GOODWILL pile. I do know... it had $5.00 written on the front of the glass window in grease pencil and that I spent the next almost 3 months begging for him to give it me. I offered him anything I could think of because I had to have it. I'm not sure if I caught him on a good day or if he truly knew he would never use it for anything... because he finally gave in.

I am thrilled he gave it to me because this is one of my favorite things in my house and is one of those things that I know I will have forever!! I'm so sad I do not have before and after pictures of this one... this spice rack was such a mess when I started to clean it up.

It was beyond dirty, rusted in places and had dried spices in all of the jars. It was a brown color with the paint chipped off in several places. There was a cross bar of wood glued onto the glass front that made it look like a window.

 Here is the short version of what we did...

We removed the glass from the front and took the whole thing apart so we could paint it. We cleaned up the hardware and the glass, spray painted the whole thing black. We cleaned the bottles by running them through the dishwasher and bleaching the plastic sprinkle caps. We spray painted the spice jar caps black and just waited for everything to dry. We put the whole thing back together... minus the cross wood from the front and there you have it! Quick and easy!

I filled the bottles with my favorite spices and just used round labels for the names of the spices. I thought about printing some cool old labels to go on the front of the bottles... but I liked the look of the old glass so much I couldn't bring myself to cover it up.

 

I have more projects coming up that could use just a little love... come back and check them out.