It's time to get organized!

I've said it before but I'll say it again.  I'm pretty anal about things.  Everything in my house has a place and I hate clutter.  The thing is that if it's in a drawer, it's out of sight/ out of mind and I don't care what the drawers in my house look like.

This frame of mind leads to situations like this:

 This is supposed to be our menu drawer.  The problem is every time I get a pay stub or a water bill, I just throw it in the drawer.  At its worst, I couldn't find any menus and when I shut the drawer, the overflow of paperwork would fall out of the back of the drawer and end up on top of my pots and pans in the cupboard below.

Eventually, I reached my breaking point.  I wanted a small filing cabinet because we don't have a lot of space in our house but even a cheap one is like $40 for like one little cube unit.  We are not made of money -- we're paying for a wedding but we really needed to get everything organized.

 I found a crate made for hanging folders at Staples and then bought a pack of hanging file folders.  All together it cost around $14 which is way more affordable.



Then began the tedious task of going through every piece of mail and paperwork.  For this, I suggest using a large table or even the floor because I didn't realize how many different categories of paperwork I had: car insurance, medical insurance, cable bill, water bill gas bill, wedding stuff, student loans and various other forms of paperwork.  Now, I've changed a lot of my stuff over to just getting paperless billing, but I still have a ton of paperwork.

This is all of the envelopes and useless papers that were in the drawer, but didn't need to be:

FYI -- I did look at all of this paperwork to make sure that there was nothing on it that could be used to steal my identity before I took the position.

After everything was sorted out, I started labeling my folders accordingly and putting all of the paperwork in there.  Now my life is much simpler.  Any time I get a bill or a piece of paperwork, I just put slip it in the folder just like I do at work.

And now I can find the menus that I'm looking for