So, I know we all decided, rather diplomatically of course, that I should fix up the nightstand before painting the filing cabinet. However, this is my last week of being less busy at work so I wanted to take advantage of the time and actually tackle a project I’ve been putting off for awhile. Ok, more than awhile. How about 6 months. (Wow, has it been that long?)
It was time to tackle the insides of the filing cabinet.
I’ve been putting this off since we moved in because we needed more space (we only had the small two-drawer filing cabinet until my parents gave us the old, fairly dinged-up second one) and we had a LOT of paperwork from the house and the renovations to figure out how to work in there. Plus, I have a bunch of new freelancing papers and other blog stuff. Yikes.
Needless to say, I had a giant pile of “to-be-filed” that was growing everyday. Luckily, I have a handy closet in my office to hide all this in so no one has seen this embarrassing little secret.
And I know it’s not super interesting, but since we share everything now, why not share this too?
The actual filing is pretty simple: categorize, label, and alphabetize. Then, I just put them all in the “new” cabinet.
For the house stuff, it was a lot of think books and envelopes of appraisals and inspections and stuff so it wouldn’t have worked that well in the filing cabinet.
So I decided to take advantage of a Pinterest idea I’d seen and use a 3-ring binder with clear sleeves to organize everything. It worked awesome and is super easy to flip through for reference.
Then, I did the same thing with all the manuals, warranty info, and other info for all our appliances and household stuff.
I know none of this is especially ground-breaking, so I’ll just leave it at this and hope if nothing else, this will just serve as inspiration to tackle whatever project you’ve been holding off for months.
Go ahead and make me feel better by sharing your put-off projects. Don’t tell me I’m the only one who does that!
I like the binder idea for all the house stuff, mine is just crammed into a folder and it’s not the prettiest thing ever. I figure when/if we can buy a new house this summer I will be way more organized with the paper work. One important piece of advice now that you are homeowners is to get a firesafe to put some of those important documents in!! I have a small one but need a bigger one as most of my homeowner papers are on the big full size legal papers, but buying them is not cheap!!
Yeah, we really do need to get a safe for things like that. I keep thinking that we’ll buy a big gun safe for Hubs’ old hunting guns (he doesn’t really ever hunt anymore) and I can just add papers to that, but we haven’t done it yet so I may need to get a small one in the meantime. Thanks for the tip!
I need to do that binder idea for all our manuals! Right now they just sit in a bag in a random container.
Good luck! It works so well!