Paper Pile Management ~ Part 3

A few weeks ago, I decided to re-organize our home filing cabinet. I divided the project into three parts. First, I organized our active files into new, alphabetical file folders and gave them a new home in our home office area. Second, I decided to store our inactive files in accordion files placed inside a bankers box that can easily be stashed in our office closet. That left me with three very large folders with a lot of miscellaneous stuff inside.

One folder was full of our travel memorabilia. It held ticket stubs, maps, photos, and other souvenirs from our various trips and vacations. 

The second folder was labeled "wedding" and it was my way of "filing" all of the paper that we accumulated in the planning of our wedding. When the wedding was over, I wanted to get rid of that stash of paper quickly, so it seemed easy enough to throw it in a folder and stuff it into the filing cabinet. But with this new organization of our paper, it really didn't fit into the active or inactive files. 

The last folder was overflowing with warranty information and manuals for all of our appliances, furniture, and electronics. It was so hard for me to find anything in this folder when I needed it so I knew something better had to be done.

I decided to conquer these last three categories by storing the items inside a binder. The binders can be kept in a cupboard in the home office so they are easily accessible when needed but out of sight otherwise. I didn't want to spend a lot of money on this project because I don't think it's a permanent solution. Eventually, I'd like to make some sort of scrapbook or other project to document our travels and I'm not sure how long I want to hang on to all of the receipts from our wedding. But for now, this binder solution seems to work well.

I did the wedding binder first since it's the smallest. I went through all of the paper in the folder and divided it up into logical categories. In the end, I had four: Receipts; Photography; Memories; and Pre-marital Counseling. Each category got one or two page protectors depending on the number of documents it held. This was a fairly easy binder to organize and it will help in the future when I'm trying to find our photographer's printing license or remember how much we spent on that delicious cake....

Next, I put together the trip binder. I sorted through all the stuff in this folder and divided it by trip. I kept all of the ticket stubs separate because I'd like to do something special with those eventually. Here are a couple ideas...

Image Via

Image Via

Each trip went into its own page protector so when I (someday) put together a scrap book or project, all our keepsakes will be protected and in one place.

Last, I tackled the manual mess.

I started by sorting through all the manuals and dividing them into categories as well: Furniture; Appliances; Electronics; and Miscellaneous.

I went through each category and made sure that we still had each particular item and then put each category into it's own page protector (or two).

I think I'd like to go back and expand this binder when I have time to put each manual in it's own protector and divide the binder into more than four categories. But for now, this is a vast improvement from where we were before:

Before!

After!

So that concludes my paper pile management project. I haven't decided what to do yet with our tippy plastic file cabinet. It might just get donated to Goodwill. We'll see. But I've been keeping up on our filing much better and I know exactly where to find the information I'm looking for. Ahh, that feels good!

How do you manage your paper piles?