Filing, Filing, and more Filing :)

I've been quite the busy bee the past several days.  I've had boxes of paperwork that I've been putting off going through, tossing, filing, etc.  In an effort to get a handle on clutter and a messy house, I began with one of the biggest issues at my house (second only to toys):  paper.

I cleared everything off the coffee table and sat for hours...and hours...going through paperwork and sorting. Pitching what didn't need kept and filing what I thought might ever come up in the future and be needed. Whew...what a job!!!

So this is what I wound up doing while going through and trying to locate papers I needed for a really important appointment last week.  Not fun!:

 So I went throughout the house and carried in all the boxes I could find that had papers in them and sat it next to the coffee table.  Then I took an empty box and went throughout the house and gathered stray papers and anything that was laying on counters and our kitchen island (which it seems is where the mail always winds up collecting).  I declared the couch and coffee table off limits to everyone else till it was all done :)

If a paper was in an envelope, it got laid flat (stapled together if more than one page) and the envelope pitched.  Once I had a big stack:

I sorted, pitched and filed.  When that stack was finished, I'd start the cycle all over again.  I worked 6 hours one day from morning till afternoon when my husband came home and was supposed to have brought me a new box of file folders (but didn't).  Off to Walmart we went where I bought TWO boxes of file folders.  I came home and worked another 6 hours.  I started all over the next day and finished up after another 6-7 hours. (Mind you, my husband is a major pack rat when it comes to papers so it was not a pretty sight!)

(I had two boxes this size...)

Yesterday, I thought all I would have to do was put all the file folders back in the file cabinet and call it a completed job at last.  Ok, that is what happened, but I forgot to take into account the files already in the file cabinets.  I had to go through those and merge most of them with the files I had just created in new folders, throw away really old files and re-organize them all and get it all straightened out.  That took several hours yesterday, but now I can honestly say the job is DONE.  If I need another paper for another meeting, etc. I can just go to the filing cabinet and pull it out and be done with it.  No more looking through piles or boxes of papers trying to find something. I certainly hope to keep up with the filing too and not let this ever get so out of hand again!

Oh...and I only went through the upstairs.  There are lot of papers here and there in the basement, but I know it's all my husband's stuff and nothing that pertains to the running of the household, so that's on him :)

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So that was all just normal paperwork.  I had to file scrapbook memorabilia I havent' gotten around to scrapbooking too. Fortunately, I HAVE been keeping up on that for the most part, so that was only a small part of the total job. This is my system for things I want to scrapbook (which I'm WAY behind on!):

I'ts a 13-month plastic file you would normally store documents in.  I buy one of these every year and when something comes up I want to save, I put it in the section of the file under the month it happened in. Then when I get around to scrapbooking it, it's right there along with things that happened in the same month. (As you can see this one is 2004 so I'm way way way behind).  (I may use the Project Life system to try to get caught up on back scrapbooking more quickly).

Maybe there is a different system that works better for you, but this has proven really handy for me.  I keep these plastic files in a box with the other years' files and when I want to work on a scrapbook for a particular year, I just pull out that one file instead of the whole box.

This is the back section of my messy living room. (I thought to take this picture in the middle of the project I'll be posting about next, so it's even messier than it would have been).You can see the little file room I have in the corner.  There are two big upright file cabinets in there left over from my husband's family's company.  The room was originally a little room built into the corner of our living room for our parrot to live in.  Sadly, our parrot died several years ago and as my husband has had a kidney transplant, he isn't supposed to have any more birds. So, I turned our bird's room into a file room.

See that super messy desk there? :)  That's the topic for my next post (probably tomorrow).  I'm tackling that too :) I actually redid that a few days ago, but need to organize a bit before I post a picture of the "after".

I bought a $15 bookcase from Walmart you put together yourself.  I put it together and then cut it in half with my jig saw and turned a bookcase into two hutches.  One hutch sits on top of my desk at the back and the other hutch sits on top of a bookcase I put to the left of my desk. In between the two hutches sits my new Cameo cutting machine.  I had originally put that downstairs in my craft room, but I quickly got tired of hauling my laptop down the stairs to the craft room every time I wanted to use my Cameo, so it's here on this desk now.  I'll use my craft room for every other crafty thing :)

More about that to come though...

I'm on a mission to get organized and de-cluttered, and after having not blogged for several days I realize I'm forgetting to work on my word of the year:  Balance.  I dove headfirst into the filing project and didn't stop for anything unless I absolutely had to instead of working on it a little at a time and moving on to something else and going back to it the next day.  BUT...it sure is nice having it all neatly filed and organized now :)  Gotta figure out that Balance thing still ;)

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