ABFoL Day 18

Today’s challenge was to put our keepsake/memory stuff in order. I laughed long and hard at that, told a friend about it, laughed long and hard with her, and then went home and spent 6 hours working on it before giving up for the night (dinner was nearly ready at that point – so glad I have a lovely husband that cooks).

I didn’t do a before picture: our memory/keepsake stuff takes up many, many boxes in the garage and a giant storage bin out there and several smaller bins and drawers inside the house as well. I went through two storage drawers and another box full of stuff today (which only leaves one more drawer and one more box inside the house to do, as well as all the garage bins).

The after picture is just of the utilitarian folders that I made that sort of resemble what ABFoL did for her kids stuff (they’re not decorated yet – I figure on Sunday I’ll have the kids dig through the scrapbook paper and let them choose their own papers,yay for money saving stashes,  but today they weren’t here while I was working). I have one folder per kid that covers pre-school, divided out by year (2’s, 3’s, Pre-K4, Pre-K5; the eldest two’s stuff is still in the garage and will have to wait for another day) and one for K-2 and another for 3-5 (our eldest is currently in grade 4). Each tab(leftovers from high school & college!  money saving FTW!) is labeled by computer tab printouts.  Then I made a folder for stuff more belonging to my spouse and I divided by year (rather than school year). I’ve basically gotten done all of the folder setup and stuff from the last two years, with occasional forays into 3 and 4 years ago as well. I will start again on Sunday (as tomorrow is the Sabbath) and try to at least get through another couple years of stuff (which is actually fairly well sorted out in the garage, just hard to get to since all our “emergency water” bottles are currently living in front of those bins).  In the meantime while I struggle to get through all these things, I have set up a folder for each kid and one for the spouse and I in a bin near the other filing stuff to file assorted papers & memory things as time goes by.