Organized Tea & Hot Cocoa Cupboard.

Hey, everyone! How was everyone's weekend? Mine was full of organizing. One organization project I got done that I am particularly proud of is turning this:

Into this:

What a difference! And it only took about a half an hour! I'm very happy to have gotten this done because now there's a little bit more storage in our kitchen than there was before. And in our small, galley, apartment kitchen, every shelf counts! To be fair, the old way (put in place by my boyfriend) actually did have a system: Tea on the bottom shelf and hot cocoa on the next shelf up. But it didn't make a lot of sense in a kitchen with so little space. Especially when you can find an easy way to fit the contents of two shelves onto one.

Since my boyfriend was a little resistant to me changing his system around, I was originally only going to move his Earl Grey tea (yellow box on the far left of the first picture) into a smaller container. Honest. Its original packaging was half empty. My boyfriend saw my point that the Earl Grey was taking up twice as much space as necessary. But then he left the kitchen and after I moved the Earl Grey into a smaller container, I got to looking through all the other boxes of tea and they were all at least half empty as well. So I used more small containers for the tea. Although you can't really see it from the picture above, the green container on the far left is Earl Grey only. Moving right, the next two green containers are full of most of the other teas we have. The only teas that didn't get taken out of their original packaging is our supply of loose-leaf tea. So much space saved!

Once I got *most* of the tea out of its original packaging and into smaller containers, I had enough room to put all of the hot cocoa on the same shelf, as long as it was moved into a smaller container as well. After I did that, the new tea/hot cocoa shelf was done! And I now had an empty shelf to fill. As you can see, the next shelf up in the picture above isn't exactly full but it still fills a purpose. It is now where the coffee/coffee filters, peanut butter, syrup and honey are kept. I did this mostly to free up at least a little space in our food cupboard. I think this system will work well because everything is much more accessible than it was before.

Interested in where I got the containers I used? I had all of them on hand but I found the green containers at BigLots in sets of three for $1.50 and the hot cocoa container at Staples in sets of three for $1. Anyway, I hope my little project inspired you or gave you some simple ideas for your own kitchen.