A Whole Pan of Tea

My neighbor has this lovely wooden box in which she keeps tea bags. Her dad made it for her, and it's a beautiful storage space.

I like to keep a variety of tea around as well, but I don't have a lovely wooden box to keep it in. And a wooden box wouldn't necessarily work for me; because some of the tea I enjoy comes in untagged, unwrapped bags, I'd have a lovely wooden box full of Mystery Tea if I just dumped it all in there.

How would I be able to tell the Celestial Seasonings Lemon Zinger from the Bewley's Irish Breakfast?

I have a couple of glass jars on my counter where I keep black tea. The small jar is for decaf tea and the larger one is for regular. Only unflavored black tea goes in these jars, so it doesn't matter if brands are mixed up.

Beyond that, my cabinet was getting overrun with boxes of delicious-flavored tea bags. Chai, Zinger, and Bengal Spice boxes were everywhere. And being short vertically challenged, I had a hard time reaching the tea that was on the back of even the lowest shelf.

So I found a way to repurpose a baking pan. A 9X13 baking pan is the perfect size to hold several boxes of tea. I've got plenty of 9X13 pans in varying conditions--so I used one that's a little past its prime, a little scratched and battered, to hold my tea bags. Tea bags don't care if the pan is no longer completely "nonstick." I can keep my tea-bag pan on the second shelf or even the top shelf; when I want a cup of tea, all I have to do is reach up and slide the whole pan out. It's neat. It's tidy. It didn't cost me anything. Win!