Family Binder

I'm so excited to share today's organizing idea with you all. 

We'll start our discussion (or perhaps, more accurately, my monologue!) today with addressing the problem many of us face. Odd, miscellaneous paperwork.  Not stuff that needs to be stored for 7 years, but not junk mail, either. The paperwork may be as different as the people who occupy the home, but I think we can all agree that papers of all shapes and sizes walk in through our front door, taking up residence in our home. I'll share the type of stuff we deal with in our home, and maybe you can adapt the ideas for the paper that takes up prime real estate on your countertop.  Perhaps you have a different system that works well for you, and that's great!  In fact, I'd love to hear about it, and use your input to tweak my system!  Doesn't this sound like fun!?

Here's my scenario....

If our society is going paperless, they must have forgotten to inform my children's school, because our kid's bring home a lot of paperwork.  And, really, I'm grateful for how the school places such a high value on communicating with parents; however, it seems, every other day, someone is coming home with something regarding an upcoming event, a form to sign, a reading log, birthday invitations, newsletters, special day calendars, blah blah blah.  These sneaky little papers, although important, have a way of bullying their way onto a pile on the counter right beside the fruit bowl, maybe together with yesterday's mail. And then there's the schedules for kid's extra-curricular activities, volunteering, church-related activities, and on and on the story goes.  For a system to work well, it needs to be readily accessible, yet out of the way so that spaghetti sauce from last night's supper doesn't splatter all over Hermanda's immunization permission slip.

The solution?

It will require perhaps an hour of your time, at most, a binder (new or otherwise), plastic page protectors, and some subject dividers that have holes that fit into your lovely binder.  It's as simple as that.

Or, if you're like me, you make it complicated by looking for beautiful subject dividers online and in stores, and still end up with a not-so-pretty looking end result.

Before I continue, I need to give credit where credit is due.  Although I've had a binder like this for some time now, just the other day I discovered a blog called  I Heart Organizing, and discovered she had almost the exact same binder!!!   What are the chances!!  Since then, I've seen other bloggers use similar systems, but with file folders instead.  But after reading HER version of the binder, I added some pages to mine....like a babysitter info page, as an example.  If after reading this, you are interested in organizing other parts of your home (like me!), I encourage you to read her very helpful, friendly blog.  She has an insanely organized home, and has so many pretty ways of getting it done.

To create this binder, begin by gathering all these papers you have laying around.  As I said before, gather all the stuff that comes home from school that I mentioned earlier,  the office christmas party invitation (well, ok, if you still have 2010's invite, throw it away!), the Proctologist's pre-op instructions for your upcoming colonoscopy, the Septic Cleaning business card that you want to refer to annually, but is currently hanging on the fridge...you get the idea.

Sort the papers into casual piles.  Keep the piles fairly general for now.  Depending how much your family has going on, you may end up with 3-7 piles. My family doesn't have 576 activities planned each week, so I can get away with the following categories "Phone/Contacts", "School", "Kids", "Mom and Dad", and "Other". 

Once you feel comfortable that the piles are not too general, but allow some flexibility, throw the individual papers into page protectors, one paper per protector.  For example, currently, in my "school" category, I have my children's annual school calendar, each child's monthly classroom calendar, the pizza/hotdog day schedule, a ziploc bag of pizza/hotdog coupons purchased (I buy them in bulk at the beginning of the year, so I can forget about it for a long time), the swimming lesson shedule for my Grade 2er, a letter from the school outlining an upcoming field trip, a school fun day schedule. Because I won't be around on Valentine's day, my children have already addressed the valentine's they'll be handing out to classmates and friends, and we have each of these cards in ziploc bags, ready to be thrown into their backpacks on the day of the exchange.  That's what's in my "school" pile.  Just saying.

Once all the papers are put into page protectors, put them into your handy binder, and separate them with subject dividers.  When the paper becomes obselete - the event has passed, or whatever - simply toss the paper into recycling, shred it and use it to make paper mache elephants with your kids.

Put the binder in a readily accessible spot in your home (not in the same box as 2002's income tax papers, behind the furnace, or at the bottom of your fridge, behind the turnips you bought at the beginning of January when you resolved to try one new vegetable per week).  I have my binder in a drawer in the kitchen island. Right close to all the action.  For those of you who are wondering, I lined my drawer with a sheet of cardstock I purchased at The Scrapbook Cottage. My drawer happens to be so small, that one 12" x 12" paper was more than enough to line it.  It's obviously not essential, but I find that I smile when I open my little drawer and see a smidgen of fun paper peeking through.

A smidgen....that's the operative word here.   My binder actually doesn't fit this drawer as well as my old binder (but the old binder was black, and the graphic pattern on this binder was calling my name).  If you look closely, you'll see there's not a lot of room between the binder and the drawers edge.

About the width of my thumb, to be more precise. My dear kids have actually adapted well, and have diligently learned a special technique of getting the binder out of it's cozy abode.  Bless their hearts.  I'm so fortunate to have sweet kids who are so gracious towards their mother and her zany ideas! I'm not sure what my husband will do if he needs access to this binder. Maybe I'll have to store a small jar of Vaseline nearby so he can grease up his finger before attempting to displace the binder.  No system is perfect, I suppose.  I can accept that.

There are more things I have in my binder, like kid's list of daily/weekly chores, and an extensive phone/contact list of friends, families and business we regularly use, but I think you've all heard enough for one day, non?

How do you store this type of paperwork? Do you have a system that works well for you?  Do you subscribe to the "pile on the counter" approach, and see no need to change it because it works for you?  I'd love to hear your ideas.