The Big Household Binder Feature

As soon as I started this blog I knew there was one topic which I absolutely had to cover, and that is putting together a household binder. I honestly don’t believe you can run an organised home without one. So this post marks the first in a series of 6, and I hope you will find them very useful!

First of all I want to put forward the case for having a household or family binder, in case it isn’t something you have considered doing before. Of all the areas people struggle to organise, I think paperwork is the one which can be hardest to tackle. A steady influx of bills, children’s school letters and other miscellaneous items means that if you don’t have a good system for storing it you can quickly lose control. Who hasn’t had a mushrooming pile of paper somewhere in their home because they didn’t know where else to put it, or has spent half an hour searching drawers for an essential letter lost amid masses of other random paperwork? A household binder solves all that!

I have had a binder system for two or three years now, but it has been an evolving process. In an ideal world, I would be able to store everything needed to run my household in just one folder but even if I par down all paperwork to an absolute minimum this isn’t possible. So we eventually ended up with four. They are:

·         A recipe binder – This has been covered in an earlier post.

·         A finances binder – This one holds all information relating to our family finances, (savings, pensions, child trust funds, etc). Once I have finished this posting series I may well cover this as my next topic, to help people get in control of their bills, budgets, etc.  

·         Product binder – This holds warranties and instruction manuals.

·         The household binder – This covers everything else. Our master folder contains every other bit of paperwork in our home.

So what exactly is “everything else”? Our household binder is broken down into 5 main categories. Each of these is going to get its own post because I don’t want to overload my readers with information – getting organised is about taking small steps after all – but these are what the categories are:

·         Home (examples: home to do list, mortgage papers)

·         Kids (examples: school information, days out ideas)

·         Husband (examples: work related papers, car information)

·         Contacts (examples: personal and utility contact information)

·         Events (examples: important dates, event planning)

Now you know what I am going to be covering in more detail over the next few weeks you have the opportunity to “play along” if this is a project you want to tackle.  For every Tuesday post there will also be a related Freebie Thursday post where you can download or print copies of all the same printables that I use in my home binder. If you want to create a family binder then these are the supplies I recommend you get hold of:

·         A big binder

·         Page dividers

·         Clear plastic sleeves

If you have the following items, then that will be really helpful too, but I wouldn’t class them as essential:

·         Label maker

·         Laminator

·         Laminating sheets

·         Dry erase pens

It would be lovely to hear from anyone who is just getting started on organising their household paperwork. Or perhaps you would like to share your own system for tackling paper mountains!