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Our homemade magnetic spice rack.

Materials: 48 70mm aluminum, glass-topped watchmaker's cases from Lee Valley. 48 3/8" rare earth magnets from the same. Gorilla glue. Magnetic inkjet paper. Lots of inspiration from the internet.

Time: A weekend, mostly spent waiting for the glue to cure.

Cost: $60, including shipping.

As we prepare to move to another old, urban apartment, we're faced with a dilemma: storage for our ever-growing spice collection. (This is a problem that we can largely blame on our local Penzeys.) Most racks don't hold more than 20 containers and take up lots of countertop or cabinet real estate, or require actual installation on the back of pantry doors -- all things that, as renters with small kitchens, we can't do. Our current apartment has a little ledge above the sink that's perfect for spice storage, but there's no equivalent in our next place.

After some internet research, it seemed like a magnetic system would be the best for us: no matter how small our future kitchens, they will always have a refrigerator. And lots of people have embarked upon this project before. This article from the Washington Post has the right idea (though involves the extra steps of making a mount), and this Craftster thread is also really helpful. Here are another two posts about a similar system to our own, and Spice Rack 2.0 was useful as well.

I ended up buying 48 70mm glass-fronted aluminum watchmaker's cases from Lee Valley, and 48 3/8" x 1/10" rare-earth magnets from the same. These magnetic storage tins look really neat, but were out of stock at the time that I did the project -- boo. And they're much more expensive elsewhere. On the plus side, the rare earth magnets that we bought do a great job of keeping the containers firmly on our fridge. Most of the time spent on this project involved waiting for the Gorilla Glue that we used to fix the magnet to each case to dry, and then waiting for all of the moisture to evaporate from the tins after I gave them all a good washing. Instead of affixing the tins with a sticker of some sort to identify their contents, I used a sheet of magnetic inkjet paper to print out the names of our spices (plus a few others that we frequently use, but happened to be out of.)

Here's the finished product. So far, it seems to be working out quite well -- for one thing, the 70mm tins are easy to scoop out of, and it's simple to tell what we need to restock. I still have my eye on the other Kamenstein containers, but the watchmaker's cases have a decent seal on them. Two of the magnets broke off our tins during washing, but if that becomes a problem I'll just order some more rare earth magnets and stick them on the inside of the spice tins. And while light in the kitchen will no doubt age the spices faster, we can always put smaller amounts in the tins if necessary; besides, our old setup consisted of clear glass- and plastic-jarred spices immediately below a light, so I'm not convinced that it's any worse. We have the extras stored in a box in the very top, closed cabinets in our kitchen, which ought to keep them fresh enough.

We also had some friends over later on the day when we put these up, and they were spontaneous and effusive in their praise. And you can't impress your friends with very many other spice racks, now can you?

Recovering the seat of an old chair.

Materials: One high-density 1" foam pad. 3/4 yard home decorating fabric. Matching thread. Staple gun and small (1/4"?) staples. Old chair.

Time: Less than an hour.

Cost: No more than $20.

Now that I have a computer with an LCD monitor (as opposed to the 60-lb, 29" beast of a CRT that I'd been using since college) I've been using an antique desk that I bought off another graduate student as my computer desk. When we got it, the front edge of the chair's seat was fraying slightly. After four months of daily use, the fake-leather-y covering broke completely, no doubt accelerated by my cat's affinity for chewing at the loose threads coming from it.

An email exchange with my dad assured me that fixing this would be, in fact, just as easy of a project as it appeared. After a shopping expedition to JoAnn's (for fabric and foam) and Home Depot (for a staple gun and staples), we were in business. I selected a cheerily striped fabric from the home decorating section to cover the seat. My mom also noted that barkcloth or tablecloth-type fabrics can also work for this purpose, though they're harder to wrestle. I resisted the allure of the NASCAR-printed blue tablecloth plastic, however.

The process was easy: Pete unscrewed the seat from the chair frame, and used a screwdriver to pull out the old staples holding down the shreddy plastic fabric stuff. I threw that and the old seat foam away, the new seat foam was marked and trimmed to fit the new seat. (In retrospect, we should've left a little extra room on all sides of the foam to cushion the seat's edges, but oh well.)

Then, I broke out the sewing machine and iron and hemmed the edges of the fabric. This is completely unnecessary in most cases, but, as noted above, I have a cat who loves to chew and shred any and all available hanging threads. (Cough, Garth.) This was actually the longest part of the whole process. Pete had to sacrifice and play some Super Smash Brothers Brawl in the interim.

Next, we pulled the fabric over the new foam, and stapled it to the back of the chair. I bought the smallest staples at Home Depot that would fit in our gun, and they're not long enough to extend through the seat back and poke me in the butt. We had to pull out some of the staples to re-do one side because the fabric wasn't initially taut enough, but that was easy enough.

Pete then screwed the seat back on the frame, and we were in business. The whole project was so quick and easy that it was rather anticlimactic.

Now, however, the cat who helped shred the old seat has decided that he likes the new one even better. Not for shredding, but for sitting. The spirit of healthy competition lives on in the Jejune household.