Dollar store tea organizer

Two dollar store boxes, two hinges and a pretty ribbon are all you need to make this cute and compact tea organizer.

Oh my gosh, I have built SO MANY tea organizers over the years. I’m a chai girl myself, but my Mum likes Orange Pekoe, my daughter likes green tea, if my tummy is upset I’ll make a cup of peppermint… the rest I really have no excuse for other than they taste good and I like to have options.

Let me show you how my tea stations have evolved over the years:

In 2016 I wanted something to house both loose-leaf and tea bags, so I whipped this up.

My loose-leaf assortment quickly outgrew this counter stand, so in 2018 I built this plate rack:

I styled it with plates and cookbooks for the photos, but in reality, the bottom shelf I used to hold the canisters of loose-leaf tea, and the drawer to hold tea bags and tea infusers.

This tea caddy I built recently (in 2022) as a gift for a friend:

I like all of them, but none were really “scratching my itch” – so I decided to try another version of a tea organizer – but one that I could easily slide into my pantry.

This time, I used these simple boxes from the dollar store.

I picked up a package of tiny hinges and attached the two boxes together.

The screws were a bit long and protruded into the inside of the tea organizer, but they were easily filed down. I added a bit of twine to the lower third of each row to hold the teabags in place. In hindsight, using a staple gun into the soft bamboo wood was a bad idea. I’m wondering now if a bit of crazy glue wouldn’t have been sufficient and less damaging?

It’s not as noticeable when the tea organizer is full, but it still kinda bugs me.

This little dollar store tea organizer easily holds 12 flavours of tea bags, with 6-10 bags in each compartment.

Oh my god – one bag is in upside down and I didn’t notice while photographing or while photo editing. My brain is in backwards anymore – I blame… ~~age~~, ~~peri-menopause~~, well, me. 😂

I wasn’t able to find a teeny, tiny latch to hold my new tea organizer closed, so I improvised and used a pretty ribbon instead.

Inexpensive, easy, cute, and it tucks into my pantry perfectly.

Pull it out of the cupboard/pantry and open it up to offer guests a wide selection.

I’ll confess, no sooner had I finished this post and tucked my tea organizer neatly away into the cupboard, than another dollar store organizer idea came to me.

But that’s for another day.