I opened my kitchen cabinet one morning and a mug nearly fell out on me.
I caught it just in time. And when I really looked at that shelf, I had to laugh. Mugs stacked two deep, tipped sideways, crowded onto every inch. I counted them later. Twenty-eight coffee mugs, for a house with two people in it.
There was the one from our trip to the Grand Canyon. A “World’s Best Grandma” one my granddaughter picked out. A couple from a bank that stopped handing them out years ago. A snowman mug that only makes sense in December. And three or four in the back I’d completely forgotten I owned.
Here’s what got me, though.
Out of all those mugs, I drink from the same two every single day. (yup, only two)
That’s the trouble with mugs. They’re so easy to collect and so hard to let go of. Every one seems to carry a little memory, or came from someone I care about, so getting rid of even one felt like tossing out the person or the moment along with it.
But a cabinet with twenty-eight mugs and two favorites isn’t really holding my memories. It’s holding clutter. And every morning, it was making the simple act of reaching for a cup harder than it needed to be.
So I finally dealt with it. And it turned out I could keep the few that truly mattered to me and clear out the rest without any guilt at all.
Learning how to declutter coffee mugs really came down to telling the difference between a mug I loved and a mug I’d just been storing.
Let me walk you through what I did.