Alphabetising the spice rack

There are small pockets of sanity in my otherwise disorganised house at present, my linen closet is all orderly, my saucepan drawer is back in order and my spice rack is in alphabetical order. now there are some unkind people fairly closely related to me who think that this is actually a mark of insanity or maybe bordering on the edge of obsessive compulsive....
So why alphabetical order? I have tried other methods.

• Group into herbs and spices,  but then I start getting caught up in the Whole what's a herb and What's a spice debate. They all come from plants  - the leaves are the herbs and the bark the spices... but what about seeds - I regard fennel and caraway seeds as herbs, but nutmeg and aniseed as spices. No - all too difficult.
• Group according to recipe - so rosemary, thyme and sage etc go together, but what about those multipurpose herbs and spices like paprika, oregano, chilli and turmeric that seem to pop up in all styles of cooking?
• Group according to maker of bottle the herbs are in - looks nicer... but pretty useless
• Random shelving - most used at the top, least used at the bottom. This was how they were arranged but if you suddenly have a passion for Thai or Cajun flavours  for a month or so, but you normally cook mostly Italian and Greek this system gets wrecked.



Interestingly as I sorted my spices I found 3 bottles of paprika, one almost empty, one almost full and one so old that the paprika was brown, so clearly organisation is necessary.

My new labels - very traditional... but I may yet design something a bit funkier

Now all the spices are shelved alphabetically, I can see where the gaps have occurred (I realised my turmeric must be all gone as there was no bottle) and I can also see that the assorted bottles don't look all that pretty. I tend to reuse bottles and refill with packet herbs so I have created a template in word and I intend to soak the labels off my old herb containers and relabel them so that even if the bottles aren't uniform the labels are. I think I like the labels I have designed but if I get bored, it's a quick job to redo them.