Making Your Home A Haven: Paper Pile Progress

How's that for alliteration?

Or for fun, try saying it 5 times in a row, really fast.

Paper pile progress. Paper pile progress.

Anyways... I am so easily distracted!

This week's Making Your Home A Haven challenge was to get rid of some paper piles in our homes by filing, shredding and pitching.

"Hello, I'm Mary Ann. I'm a piler. Especially when it comes to paper."

I can't just throw it away. Oh no. I must stack it and pile it. When it becomes too much, I then throw everything in the junk room office/sewing room and close the door. There the piles grow and multiply until one day it takes me one whole day or more to deal with it.

Apparently, I like to do things the hard way.

This week, I tackled some of the paper piles. I say some, because I'm sure there's more lurking about.

On Tuesday evening, I cleaned off my hutch which is a hot spot for clutter and paper. I also spent a long while shredding the pile of stuff that's been stacked on the shredder for a long time.

The clean empty space was wonderful!

On Thursday, I gathered up several piles of paper from around the house, piled them up and took a  picture to show you.

After the photo shoot, I got to work! I pulled a trashcan over so I could fill it.

Then I sorted.

Most went into the trash.

Some went into the "To shred" pile. (Anything with our names, address, or personal information.)

A little was sorted into categories to file.

My husband helped me with some of the sorting. It took a LONG time. There was a lot of paper there. I was also making pitas at the same time.

When we were done sorting, I started to shred. Our shredder which has not been working the best lately, all but stopped working. So I bagged up the rest of the "To shred" documents and set them aside to shred when our shredder starts working again or we get a new one. Whichever happens first.

Note that I did not throw them back in the dungeon where they could continue to grow and multiply.

See, I'm making progress!

What was left was to file the rest of the papers. Which I did. The filing cabinets need to be reorganized but that will be a project for another time. I also got most of our tax information organized.

I'm so glad I got this dreaded chore out of the way. Such a good feeling!

Next week's challenge: Do an outside chore that we've been putting off.  Not that I know anything about that.:-)

**Thanks to Monica for hosting the Making Your Home A Haven challenge!