Operation Pantry Purge Part VI: Tea Time

Operation Pantry Purge did continue, despite my not blogging about it. My initial deadline was a bit too aggressive, but the spirit of the purge remains with me still (and has transferred to other areas of the house as well). Notable purges include:

• 4 bottles of sparkling juice taken to Thanksgiving dinner
• a box of brownies made and donated to a bake sale fundraiser
• a batch of bran muffins given to Kevin for his birthday
• a bag of paper plates and plastic cutlery donated to Becky's home group

This past weekend produced a highly successful general purge, and to kick it off, I worked on the hot drinks and candies shelf of the pantry. If you saw our tea collection, you might deduce, “Wow, these people really like tea! They must drink tea every day! There must be 100s of tea bags there!” and you'd be right, but only in your third assumption. If you conjectured “Wow, these people must really like variety in their tea selection. They must have trouble choosing. I bet they have a really messy tea shelf,” I think you'd be more correct.

When I began thinking about how to deal with the toppling tea boxes problem, I researched buying a wooden tea box like they display for you at fancy restaurants. But it wouldn't quite hold the quantity of tea we had, wasn't cost effective, and many options wanted you to buy it full of tea already which would only make the problem worse long before it made it better. So I went looking down in the basement, that veritable treasure trove of clutter where our inner hoarders hide out, to see what storage options I might find. I returned to the pantry with a MacBook Air box, an unused stacking cannister set, and a child's play basket. With luck, the computer box comfortably sat 5 packaged teabags across, the cannister held a nearly full box-worth of loose tea bags, and the blue basket wrangled almost all of the tea odds and ends! I even found a nice colorful fabric piece to lay in the bottom of the box (which already had sticky squares in all four corners to hold it down). I won't see it unless we drink more of this tea, but you know, someday!

I refrained from actually counting the tea. Some metrics aren't worth the effort. :-)