Remember way back in the day, like two months ago, I did a William Morris project and said that I wanted to buy a filing cabinet so I could get our bills and important papers out of diaper boxes on the basement floor?
This weekend, the Mister and I bought a four drawer vertical filing cabinet. We don't have an office in this house, so we tucked it in the closet in the boys' room.
Also in the closet in the boys' room were seven bins of papers.
All the papers from about the last five years that we have been lugging around from house to house. In 2009 we did a massive purge of papers when we put our house on the market. That purge took an entire day and gave us fourteen banker boxes of papers to be shredded, because between the Mister and I, we are packrats who save every scrap of paper that we have ever touched. We attempted to shred it ourselves but after an hour we burned out the motor on our shredder, and we ended up calling in a professional document disposal company. Since that purge I have tried to be less Hoarder-y and only keep what we need.
Clearly I have fallen down on that job, since I got rid of about fifty pounds worth of Verizon phone bills from the last three years. I could have wallpapered a barn with the amount of Verizon bills I had. On the bright side, I found the titles to our cars.
Being an eternal optimist, I figured I could transfer all the papers in those seven bins into the filing cabinet in a hour or so this afternoon.
Lets just say that my estimate was off by about five hours.
Since the filing cabinet is in the boys' closet, I made a mess all over Greg's bed, and had to put stuff away so the kids could go to bed before I was really finished.
I still have one box left, and another bin of stuff I had shipped out here separately.
I'll try to finish it up tomorrow.
I'm linking up to Pancakes and French Fries William Morris Project.
This weekend, the Mister and I bought a four drawer vertical filing cabinet. We don't have an office in this house, so we tucked it in the closet in the boys' room.
Also in the closet in the boys' room were seven bins of papers.
All the papers from about the last five years that we have been lugging around from house to house. In 2009 we did a massive purge of papers when we put our house on the market. That purge took an entire day and gave us fourteen banker boxes of papers to be shredded, because between the Mister and I, we are packrats who save every scrap of paper that we have ever touched. We attempted to shred it ourselves but after an hour we burned out the motor on our shredder, and we ended up calling in a professional document disposal company. Since that purge I have tried to be less Hoarder-y and only keep what we need.
Clearly I have fallen down on that job, since I got rid of about fifty pounds worth of Verizon phone bills from the last three years. I could have wallpapered a barn with the amount of Verizon bills I had. On the bright side, I found the titles to our cars.
Being an eternal optimist, I figured I could transfer all the papers in those seven bins into the filing cabinet in a hour or so this afternoon.
Lets just say that my estimate was off by about five hours.
Since the filing cabinet is in the boys' closet, I made a mess all over Greg's bed, and had to put stuff away so the kids could go to bed before I was really finished.
I still have one box left, and another bin of stuff I had shipped out here separately.
I'll try to finish it up tomorrow.
I'm linking up to Pancakes and French Fries William Morris Project.
All these newfangled inventions! Paperless billing! What will you whippersnappers think up next?
ReplyDeleteFew things in life cause me as much stress as the mountains of paper involved!
ReplyDeleteOrganizing paperwork just makes me tired. I'm so proud of you for tackling it! When I went to tackle mine, I realized that with all the online systems for organizing paperwork that are around now I don't have much use for the filing cabinet I've been keeping around. Didn't think that would happen!
ReplyDeletePaper. Paper. Paper. Ack. Even when we went paperless with most of our bills, we still have piles of paper coming in each month. Every month I collect and file them, and then take the confidential recycling out to work to shred. It is joyously fun, and I can think of nothing better to do with the vast amounts of free-time that I've got. ;-)
ReplyDeleteSeriously good job on getting it started. Not fun task.
Nice job! I've got that on my to do list also. About 2 years ago, I had to move a bunch of stuff out of my filing cabinet from the US (they file in 2-ring binders here in Germany which I just cannot fully get behind) and I know a bunch of that can be trashed. Not to mention a ton of stuff in my big legal filing cabinet. Thankfully I now have a scanner that I can feed documents into. That and Evernote will be my new best friends on that project!
ReplyDeleteOh my goodness. I feel your pain. We just sorted through our entire file cabinet and I shredded enough paper to fill seven 13 gallon garbage bags.
ReplyDeleteNow I'm going the opposite direction you are and reverting to file boxes rather than a file cabinet. We just switched to paperless billing and bank and visa statements so I'm hopeful we'll be low on things to file in the future.
I love a post that starts off with Hyperbole and a Half phrase!
ReplyDeleteAnd organized papers make me happy!