Hasta La Ideas

In my grandmother’s farmhouse, at the center of the kitchen table, stood a mug tree. From the branches of the mug tree hung four coffee cups in varying shapes and sizes. Whenever her friends or family members would visit, they would have a seat at the table, grab themselves a mug, and my grandmother would pour them a warm cup of coffee.

If you have the kind of life where people drop in on a daily basis for coffee and a chat, I like the idea of a mug tree. A mug tree keeps cumbersome mugs out of the cupboard and is an inviting element in a kitchen. Unfortunately, I live in an area where people write each other e-mails, survey their calendars, and schedule appointments to meet at coffee shops instead of stopping by each other’s homes on a whim. A mug tree in my house would have two cups on it used each morning by my husband and me, and two mugs that would simply collect dust.

As a result, I use a shelf in the kitchen cupboard to store coffee mugs. And, if you do the same thing, you know that coffee mugs and tea cups take up a lot of shelf space. Even if you use an under-shelf storage system for mugs, they still get in the way.

I recently went searching for stacking mugs, in an attempt to reclaim some of our kitchen shelf space and found these from Heath Ceramics:

I’ve ordered a handful to replace the chipped and faded ones in our cupboard. We’ll see if they help save space and keep the cupboards organized.

What do you do to keep mugs from overwhelming your cupboards? How do you organize your coffee cups? What is the “right” number of mugs for your home? And, when was the last time you checked on your mug population to make sure it wasn’t getting out of control?