As some of you know, I write the occasional article for Canadian Home Workshop magazine. That's fun, and brings in a bit of tool-buying change. But the downside is that you need to send in your project for photographing, which means you can't actually use it for a while!

My wife wanted this new spice rack. Wanted it bad. Our kitchen, like all of them, I'm beginning to think, is too small and doesn't have enough storage space. So we wanted a spice rack to get the spice jars out of the cupboard.

I came up with this design, using a tambour door kit from Lee Valley. Seemed to work pretty good... but then I had to drop it off at the magazine for them to pose and photograph and all that fun stuff. Which meant we had to wait another month before we could actually use it.

Ah well, it's in happy use now, and the issue even hit my mailbox, so here are some photos and notes.

I find sketchup to be more and more useful. In particular, I used it to find a 'sample' kitchen online in the 3d warehouse (even looked nicer than my kitchen) and place the project right there to see how it looked.
spice-garage2-in-kitchen-close.jpg

It looked good, so I got busy. It was a bit fiddly, working with the tambour. For one thing, you absolutely must apply finish before you assemble it. I don't think I could have applied finish to the tambour otherwise!
finished-open-sm.jpg

It's about 20" wide, and fills the space between the counter and the upper cabinet. This is enough for two tall shelves, and one shorter shelf, to hold our spices. The reason for the shorter shelf is the space used by the tambour.
installed-halfopen.jpg