Laura's Plans: Create your own coffee bar in 5 easy steps

Create your own coffee station in 5 easy steps

Good coffee is a pleasure. Good friends are a treasure.

When my husband and I bought our house, we knew that we wanted it to be filled often with family and friends. We love having guests over, and we love to make everyone feel welcome.

And I can't imagine anything more welcoming than a fresh pot of coffee or a mug full of hot tea.

So we decided to turn one corner of our dining room into the ultimate coffee station.

Err. . . make that a hot drink station. We also have tea, hot cider, and hot chocolate available for our (crazy) non-coffee drinking guests. ;)

Want to create a coffee bar in your own home? Here's how to do it in 5 easy steps.

Note: This post contains links for items I love that are sponsored by Amazon and/or Target. Read my full disclosure statement here.

1. START WITH A CABINET

How to create an organized coffee and tea station

You can either buy a new stand-alone cabinet, or repurpose a piece of furniture you already have, like a small table. Either way, you'll use this space for the bulk of your coffee/tea items.

We bought this cabinet at Target, and we absolutely love it.

On the top shelf in the cabinet we store:

Our K-cup carousal
Espresso cup and saucer set
Regular ground coffee (which we store in this Fiesta canister)
Decaf ground coffee (which we store in a large mason jar)

On the bottom shelf, we keep all of our tea.

2. CHOOSE YOUR APPLIANCES

Time to pick out which machines you'll actually be using to create your coffee or hot drinks. A lot of people have one, or maybe two that they use regularly. We actually use all three of ours on a weekly basis, so we made sure that there was enough room on top of the cabinet that we chose to house them all.

Coffee maker

We have a very simple coffee maker, and we use it every day. We set everything up the night before and hit the button to start brewing when we come downstairs in the morning.

This coffee maker is perfect for parties and the Bible studies we host at our house every other week. We make sure the pot is always full, and guests can easily pour themselves a cup whenever they want throughout the evening.

Espresso machine

When we have friends over for dinner, or when we have a little extra time on a weekend morning, we enjoy dabbling in the art of copying our favorite Starbucks drinks. Lattes are my husband's speciality. Yum!

Keurig machine

We use our Keurig anytime we're making a single serving of coffee. For example, if one of our guests requests a cup of decaf, or it's just me having a caffeine craving in the middle of the afternoon.

Sometimes we use K-cups, but more often we'll use this reusable K-cup and fill it with coffee that we grind ourselves.

Note: These links will take you to the updated versions of our coffee machines. Apparently we're living in the past, and ours are no longer being made!

3. HANG YOUR MUGS

What would a coffee station be without all of your favorite coffee mugs? I absolutely LOVE our Fiesta java mugs, and couldn't wait to hang them up where I would get to see them every day.

For our coffee station, we purchased and hung this shelf from Hobby Lobby. It comes with hooks that work perfectly for hanging our mugs.

4. USE BASKETS OR BINS TO ORGANIZE SMALLER ITEMS

Create your own coffee station in 5 easy steps: Use baskets to organize your coffee accessories

The shelf that we bought came with 4 wire baskets. They're perfect for gathering and neatly organizing a few of the smaller coffee accessories.

In these four baskets, we store:

Hot chocolate and spiced cider packets
Coffee filters
Small mason jars filled with flavored coffee grounds
Extra K-cups

5. DECORATE!

Good coffee is a pleasure. Good friends are a treasure.

This saying perfectly sums up how I felt about coffee. It's a simple pleasure that makes my days just a little bit more enjoyable. But the REAL treasure is being able to share what we have with our friends.

We found this tin sign at Hobby Lobby, but you can find coffee-themed artwork all over the place. Spend a little bit of time finding something that will make you happy when you look at it every day.

Here are a few other little things we keep on hand to make our coffee experience extra-awesome:

Torani sauces: We have chocolate, white chocolate, pumpkin spice and caramel

Coffee syrups: We use these to make our specialty lattes. We keep them in a liquor dispenser, which works fairly well. In retrospect, I should probably have kept them upright because the dispensers tend to gum up quickly if you don't clean them obsessively. But they look pretty, don't they? ;)