When we moved into our new home a few months ago, I vowed to keep things organized and easy to find. There are a few documents we don’t need very often but when we do need them, it’s helpful to have on-hand without having to dig for them. They all fall into the categories of maintenance, manuals and warranties. Paperwork for garage instructions, water heater warranty information and so on can really come in handy if you need to quickly fix something!
In the past, I’d file them away. Despite our best attempts at keeping our filing cabinet organized, we’d let our “papers to file” pile add up…and up…and up. We still file old bills and statements, but I really needed a better system for these home documents. I searched Pinterest and combined a few of the ideas I saw pop up over and over.
Time Needed: 15 Minutes
Materials Needed:
- Large, durable 3-ring binder. I got a 3’ D-ring binder
- Page protectors
- Dividers
Time to Assemble!
- Gather all of your maintenance records, manuals and warranty documents and put them aside.
- Assemble your binder inserts, dividers up front and all of the page protectors in the back. As you add documents to your binder over time, just pull a page protector our and move it to the appropriate section.
- Decide how you want to organize the documents within the binder. Some people like alphabetical, some people like by category, some like alphabetical by category, and some people like to just put everything in the order in which they add to the binder. I chose to just add them as I get them because it would drive me crazy to see the little divider tabs not line up if I switched them around.
- Write out your tabs for your dividers to correspond with what you’re putting into each page protector. I like to have a tab for each individual item rather than each category.
- Slip the paperwork into a page protector and pop it in behind the corresponding divider.
- As new paperwork comes in, just keep adding!
Voila! I keep mine in my kitchen in a high cabinet. Always accessible but tucked away!
Do any of you have great storage solutions for your home paperwork? Share in the comments!
Thanks for sharing this Jen. I have to get this done with my papers. We have a safe that we keep important papers in. Do you think this binder would be worthy of keeping in the safe, or just a kitchen shelf or cabinet?
I just keep it in my pantry. If the house goes down, we won’t need the binder anyway 😉
Love it! I would love to hear your tips on actual moves and how to creat lists, do’s and dont’s. We have an overseas move in less than a year and I am already ready wanting to plan and purge. 😉
So exciting though! Purge NOW! We moved so much crap we should have gotten rid of! I have a few moving posts in the works!