A Place for Everything, and Everything in its Place

Favorite words of every OCD. :)  The latest subject in my attempt to deal with all of our "stuff," and create a household that is clutter-free and easy to maintain: the File Cabinet.  Oh, how I dread the file cabinet.  It seems impossible to not have the files constantly overflowing and very hard to organize them so you can actually find what you need.

I probably would have saved this element of our household for last, as its not terribly fun to deal with files --- but for my birthday last year, my sister and mother gave me a filing organizing system called Freedom Filer.  Ever since, it has sat in a pile of junk for me to deal with, and as I picked my way through this pile, I decided it was time to give it a go.

Freedom Filer was definitely designed by an OCD --- it even has practice labels so you can decide how you want to stick them on the label holders (stuck directly on top of the plastic insert, or inside the insert, or on a piece of paper in the insert) --- and yes, I did practice, and includes a discussion on why they chose to use sticker labels instead of paper labels.  I am totally impressed with and in love with this system, and admittedly wished that I had come up with the idea myself.

It was a lengthy process to set it up, which included three separate trips to Office Depot for file folders, as I kept under-estimating how many files we have.  Apparently, we have just about 100 files.  And dealing with the files themselves was not much fun.

But now, how impressive does our file cabinet look?  And while I haven't done any filing myself yet, Mark told me that it was indeed much easier after he dealt with our last round of bills.

So glad to be done with that project!

I'm not the only one completing organizing projects in our house, though.  Check out Mark's latest project:

The Garage

I wish he had taken true "before" pictures, as the garage was a MESS.  He's already spent many hours cleaning it up to get to this point.  His plan is to turn our garage into a use-able workshop, with future plans to build an airplane in it!  So the first step is cleaning out all the clutter that has been accumulating there during the past five years.  He's made good progress!  He is also working on the "design" of the garage.  And I should mention that he has a little OCD in him as well, as I caught him using my old engineering graph paper to draw out the dimensions of the garage (both overhead and elevation) and also created to-scale cut-outs for the contents of the garage to see where he would put them.  It's all rather cute. 

So look for future updates with progress as Mark begins installing wiring, insulation, a wall A/C unit, drywall, paint and then builds his cabinets to hang on the wall!  Whew, he's going to be busy!