Welcome back to the Home Management Binder Series! I am sharing my process of creating a home management binder, and hope to pass along some inspiration to others for managing their household. For those of you just joining us, here is a quick rundown of the schedule for this series.
9/7 - Family
9/14 - Pets
9/21 - School
9/28 - Cleaning postponed
10/5 - Home
10/12 - Finances
10/19 - Food and Grocery
10/26 - Health and Fitness
11/2 - Beauty
11/9 - Crafts and Projects
11/16 - Vehicle
Feel free to follow along (or jump in and out depending on your needs) and make your own Home Management Binder as I whip mine into shape! Many of the organizational tools and tips you''l see here can be used in other types of home management systems as well, if binders aren't your thing.
First I have to apologize for cancelling last week's post on my cleaning section. I found that making detailed cleaning lists and records for my whole apartment was more than I could fit into a week , let alone making up printables and writing a post about it. So I have decided to postpone the cleaning section until the end of the Home Management Binder Series. Sorry for any confusion!
This week I'll show you what I have set up for my Home section of my binder. There are two main purposes I wanted this section to be used for. The first is to help me keep track of all the decorating and design plans I have for my apartment, and the second is to store inventories of all my stuff, mostly for insurance reasons.
The first six pages in my Home section are all inventories. Some inventories are for insurance purposes, in case anything happens to my home (god forbid) I will have records of all the valuables I own. Then there are some inventories I just wanted to include to help me keep track of all my stuff (I'm a bit of a hoarder).
In a perfect world, I would have everything in my house meticulously chronicled down to the last hair-tie. Unfortunately that is a bit unreasonable, so I tried to just make sheets for important categories of possessions. I ended up with inventories for my furniture, electronics, appliances, purses & wallets, jewelry & accessories and DVDs.
The first five pages all have the same basic layout. The first column is for a description of the specific items. Next I have a column for the value. I will either try and remember what I bought the item for, or estimate the value based on googling similar products.
The third column is for the photo ID number. I read that the best way to make a home inventory for insurance purposes is to have a photo. This proves that you did in fact own what you say you did. So as I make my inventories, I plan to take a photo of each item, and then record the corresponding picture number in that column. Finally I left a column for any notes I want to add about that item.
I made a slight change to the DVD inventory. Since everything is going digital these days, there are a couple of movies and TV series that Melissa and I have purchased electronic copies of through places like Amazon and iTunes. I made this printable so I can keep track of what movies/shows we own and where I can find them.
This page is more for my personal reference than insurance purposes, as I doubt any insurance company would be inclined to replace my True Blood or Big Love collections.
After my inventories, I included another mini-divider to separate all my decorating information. The first page I am so excited about, and got the idea from Jen at iHeart Organizing. She is one of my favorite organizational bloggers and I get so much inspiration from her blog! This page will be used to help me remember all paint-related information from projects around the apartment. You can find a free download of a page similar to mine over at Jen's blog.
The first three columns are to record the paint's name, sheen and color code. These will be helpful if I ever run out of a color and want to go buy more. The fourth column is the 'used in' column, where I can write what projects I used this color in. The last column is my absolute favorite. It is for a 'swatch' of the paint color, you just take a q-tip and dab a bit of paint right onto the paper!
So far I don't have any painted projects in my apartment, but I have so many plans to do them. I'm doubly excited to start them now that I can use this awesome page to keep track of all the colors of my home.
After my paint reference page, I have a simple list page printed out for each of my rooms. I plan on writing all the plans I have for each room on their corresponding page so I can keep track of it all. The worst feeling is knowing that you had a great decorating plan for a space about a month ago, but can't remember what it was. Now I don't have to worry about that problem.
Behind each room I plan on including design inspiration or project ideas I find while surfing around the blog world or Pinterest. I'll simply print out a picture or project instructions and stick the page behind the room I plan to use it in. I'm always seeing so many things I want to try, but I can never remember them when I'm actually trying to plan a space.
I'm also hoping that having all my design plans corralled into one space will help me move faster on decorating. Having all my inspiration in one spot will help me dive right into a project rather than having to take time to go back to searching for inspiration I had previously found.
I am so excited to dump all the plans I have for each room from my head into this section. And I'm double excited to be able to list all my important 'stuff' in my inventories. Do you keep a home inventory? What kinds of stuff do you have in your inventory, did I leave anything out? And are you just as smitten as I am with my paint reference page? I can't thank iHeart Organizing enough for the inspiration on that one!
Come back next week to see how I keep track of where my money goes in my Finances section!
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