Both my husband and I enjoy drinking coffee. One of the first things we do each morning is to make a pot of coffee. Through the years we have collected coffee mugs. We both like a large deep cup that keeps the coffee hot and allows for fewer trips to the coffee maker. Some of the coffee mugs we have bought as souvenirs from various trips and others have been given to us as gifts. It is nice to have the variety of cups and it makes it easier to tell which cup belongs to which person if it gets set down. We live in a lake home so we have many overnight guests. We have found that guests enjoy picking out which cup they are going to use. We keep the coffee mugs stored in the cupboard above the coffee maker for easy access.

We are discovering that we are getting more coffee mugs than our storage area will allow. Because we prefer the larger cups they do take up a great deal of space. To help deal with this I moved the cups that match our stoneware set to a different cabinet. We really only use them when we serve dessert after a meal. This freed up some space, but we still found that we were trying to stack the large coffee mugs on top of each other in the cabinet, which does not work very well. We decided that we would put some of the cups into a box for a garage sale that we are going to have next spring. I brought a box in the house and some newspaper to wrap the cups in so they would not chip or break. We started going through the coffee mugs. I started wrapping up one mug that I had not drunk out of for a long time. My husband mentioned that this was one of his favorites and he did not want to sell it. It went back in the cabinet. My husband wanted to get rid of a cup that I had bought on a trip to Canada. This trip held great memories for me so I did not want to part with it. We soon found that the only coffee mugs we were willing to put on the garage sale were ones that had company logos on that we had gotten at different business conferences. We only had four cups that fit into that category.

We decided on an alternative solution. We bought a mug tree to set on the counter next to the coffee maker. We hang six of our favorite coffee mugs on the tree. This gives extra space in the cabinet and we did not have to part with any of our favorite cups.