How To Organize a Coffee Station

I have a bone to pick.

There’s this term that’s been popping up over and over again in home organizing content, and I don’t think it means what you think it means.

That term: station. As in, coffee station, or gift wrap station, or craft station.

But here’s the thing: “station” is just a fancy word for “organizing a category of things.”

There’s tons of content about how to create a station. A lot of these stations look really aesthetic and gorgeous and taking up of lots of space, and for those reasons they are both very exciting and also kind of out of reach. Perfect Instagram and TikTok engagement bait! But I am here to tell you, all that means is that somebody organized their coffee supplies or their gift wrap.

Part of the allure of a station is that it looks like something you have to add or buy. But that’s a serious misconception. You can actually create a station for whatever you're looking for using the space available if you just rethink where you put your stuff. 

For example, when you organized your kitchen you might have assumed that all the things that you drink out of have to go together and all the things that you eat have to go together. So your mugs are on one shelf and your coffee is way across the room in another cabinet, and that combo means that making coffee is a little bit annoying.

What a coffee station does is change the categorization. Instead of deciding that the categories of “drinking vessels” and “consumables” are the most important, you decide that the category of “making coffee” is important. You’re still organizing like objects with like, but you’re prioritizing what matters to you, which in this case is making coffee.

Once you understand that, then you’ll understand that a station can be created without buying a single thing in the space that you already have. So if you’ve been loving the idea of a station, I want you to know that it’s not out of reach. All you have to do is rethink your categories!