Mission: the filing cabinet

This week while our town was virtually shut down during a winter front blew in, I tackled a project that has been weighing me down for at least 2-3 years. (BTW, if you need a good laugh, listen to the San Antonio news during one of these "arctic blast" times. Everyone from anywhere north of SA laughs their heads off at us. It got down to freezing for 2 days straight and we had a little bit of ice. If everyone from Oklahoma north shut down like we did this week every time they had the same weather, they'd be shut down for 5 months every year. You'd think we had had a true ice age!)

I know most of you think that I have, in true type-A personality form, every part of my life organized, categorized, and indexed. However, even type-A's have some little area of their lives that aren't up to code. One of mine has been my filing cabinet. It is about 10 years old, rusted metal, and the filing system hopelessly outdated. For the past few years I've used the excuse, "Well, there's no reason to re-organize this until we get a new filing cabinet upstairs." It took us a little longer to get that than we thought, but last month we finally bought Kelly a new office desk that has two filing drawers built in.

So I hoed in this week while we were shut in the house, and cleaned it out. I was downright embarrassed at what was in there. Auto insurance policies from cars we no longer own, home owner's insurance policies from a house we no longer own, health insurance stuff from two fiscal years ago, every privacy policy ever sent to us by the bank, receipts for furniture long since donated to charity, discharge orders from hospital and ER visits from years ago ... Well, I think you get the picture.

So then I started shredding. And shredding. I overheated the shredder twice and had to stop for a while. I filled THREE big kitchen bags full - each bag representing about 4 emptyings of the shredder. This doesn't count another full bag of owner's manuals (many for things we no longer own) and envelopes.

So my organizational lesson learned: go through papers at least once a year, to keep it from becoming a behemoth. Learn what to keep - many owners manuals are online now. Many bills can be emailed, meaning less paperwork to keep up with. (And always shred things to keep any bad guys from stealing your stuff.)

Now our paperwork is neatly re-organized into TWO drawers, and a much more workable system is in place. I used to be bad about letting the "things to be filed" stack get way too high before I filed stuff. Then I rearranged things and I don't have a place to put that stack, so I have to file them immediately. This has worked so well, that my next step is to make myself go through our drawers twice a year: once in January and once in July (Kelly's company's fiscal year begins on July 1, so all insurance stuff begins then).

I know it doesn't seem like much, but it gives me a wonderful fuzzy feeling to get something like this accomplished. And I thought it might give some of you that same feeling to know that not everything in my house is as orderly as you would think. :)