A little organization.

As we go through this house room-by-room & painting & decorating, I am also purging.  Some of my purging involves making a future garage sale pile in the basement.  Some goes on Craigslist.  And some gets trashed.  With the hopes that once I get done with the house, everything we don't need, is gone.  Should we have done this before we moved, yeah, but we don't tend to do things the normal way around here.

Our kitchen "office" nook had been taken over by, well, by everything that didn't have a home.  Kids' papers & art from school.  Junk.  To do piles.  Pieces from old projects.  Just endless stuff.

Finally, I couldn't take it anymore.  I dug in this past weekend.  I got it all purged & organized & I'm excited to KEEP it that way.  Since I was going, I also dug into the file cabinet.  Yikes, that took a day in itself & is still not 100% done.  I felt a bit like I should have been on the hoarders TV show all the stuff I cleaned out of there.  Most of it was at one time important stuff, just 3 years ago, not now.

I have one file to organize yet in the file cabinet.  I need to find a new address book to organize all my torn off old Christmas card labels I have stored.  And I want to organize a couponing book eventually.  But its so much better than it was.

Inside of 2 drawers before I got started.

 The cabinet.  I forgot to take a before picture inside the doors before I cleaned them out, but trust me, it was BAD! 

After!!

Cork on the right door for tacking up papers to not loose.  The right has a clip board for a grocery list & key hooks.  The middle shelf bins are labeled for Jeff, Katie, Kids & Bills. 

The 3 ring binders organize all the manuals we have.  Before all of them were just crammed in a drawer.  This takes up less space & is so much easier to find what you want.

Pocket dividers are labeled inside.

I have a stack of manuals too that I think are all our stuff from the old house.  I need to sort through them yet & make sure that's what they all are.  Then mail them back there or go stick them in the mailbox.

The GREATEST thing I did with this project is "invest" {cause they really aren't spendy} in a label maker.  I'm not real sure how I have lived without one thus far in life. 

The little black basket holds a file for receipts, business cards & gift certificates.  Some coffee cups from Costa Rica for loose change & stamps.

 The desktop has a charging station. More cork added to the tile with command velcro for a place to pin & not loose important stuff.  And the white bin is a catch for kids artwork/papers to sort through.

Everything of course got pretty shelf liner {cause I love it!}  And I found some clear organization bins at Target too.  Check out the chapstick!  See, all that mess we had we could never find a chapstick & we had 5!! 

I also got a bin to stash mail & hold our daily use keys.  

As for the file cabinet.... my process looked something like this.

 Part of my shred pile.  I had a paper shredder.  Had as in I got through about 3/4 of the stuff & then the kids started "helping" and then... well its broke.  So I need to get a new one.

Most of this was bills, statement of benefits, etc. from 2009 & 2010.  We had SOOO much stuff when the kids were born.  And I battled so much with insurance.  I had notes of who I talked to & when & what they were resolving, etc, etc.  I think it was time to part with that stuff.  

I bought some pretty Washi tape to put "pretties" on the front of my files.  And to cover up old writing on some of the file folders.  Then everything got a pretty little printed label!

It feels SOOOOO good to have most of this behind me!


Next....the front hall coat closet....