Home Management Binder - The Big Reveal!!!

Our lives are organized!!!  Well...almost;) I made a Home Management Binder, which is the Weekly Challenge on this site: A Bowl Full of Lemons :)  Her blog is really cool, and is very inspiring to those of us who have cluttered/crazy lives.

This took a total of probably 2 hours over a few days - it could be done all in one sitting but I spread it out - it can be overwhelming but when you are done - you have complete home organization!

First of all, I bought a cheap but cute binder from Target - gotta love Tar-jjjay!  It seems a lot of the women on this blog got the same binder....gotta hate mass produced items, lol;)  What an oxymoron!  Anyways, then I used durable, firm scrapbook paper to make really pretty dividers, even though I bought dividers - they weren't cute enough for me!!  I used my guillotine (my scrapbooking one, not my torture one...that only comes out when someone ticks me off, muahahahaha!).  A label maker is also a plus to have to make everything look neat.  So here are my starter pics....

 I didn't use those school-ish dividers, but I'll save them for another project...

 chop chop chop

The dividers were really easy to make...just measure and cut them to fit nicely in your binder and then cut the tabs using the divider you cut previously to line them up right.  Aren't they pretty?  Much better then those yucky Manila, yellow dividers.

Then I printed out the "Week at a Glance" freebie she has listed, which I'll post here - it's cute and has a nice, usable layout for us.  I put this page in the very front of our binder, so that it's the first thing you see when you open in - that works for us because we are always wondering what our week/school/work schedules look like.  See how pretty my homemade dividers are??

On her website she links to an Etsy shop where you can buy really nice planning printables, but I just couldn't bring myself to pay money for that stuff, no matter how cute they are.  So I searched the net and found this reeeeeally cool site - all FREE planner printables!!  There are a lot!!  I didn't use all of them, because some just weren't functional for us...but wow I was excited with the find.  I also made some myself in Excel, as well as printing our budgeting sheets from Dave Ramsey since we really love his financing advice.  Here are all the pages that are going in our binder...

So you see all the organizing that is going into this!!  We have a medical info list with Dr names and numbers, and ER sheet just in case, a list of who and where all our bills are going all in one place, calendars for months and the whole year at a glance, menu plans, recipes, to do lists & chores, contacts, and Ashley has a tab all to herself for a list of her chores and school stuff, etc.

I also use these handy dandy little guys, all from the $1 section at Target....

The little notepads are what I write my shopping lists on.  The pink and purple plastic things are where my coupons are organized, I'll do a whole post on those another day!  These things help me keep my life straight, and will always be kept with our Home Management Binder!

Now I have to fill it with all of our info, which is the next part of the battle but of course I didn't want to post it full of our info all up on the internet;)  I'm really excited!!!  I hope this inspires you to organize a little too - if you aren't already!  I know this is going to be great for us, and will eliminate a lot of crappy paperwork that piles up because we don't want to throw/shred anything out with numbers or addresses that we may need, or school papers that fly around everywhere, etc.

The final product!!!

annnnnnnd done! ;)