FILE CABINET MAKEOVER

I finally got rid of the file cabinet! There’s really no sense in storing a bunch of old papers. I really didn’t even know what I had in there except that it was, “REALLY IMPORTANT” Turns out I was wrong. Yes, there were a lot of really important papers in there but a lot of my filing cabinet was full of junk and papers that were 10 years old or more.

The mess you see above is nothing! It was so messy! I had paper everywhere. Even in my hair and it took awhile. Probably 2 whole days. That’s with 4 kids so it’s not like I was working on it the whole time but I just want you to know it’ll take some time. 🙂

You’ll need a good scanner. I used my HP printer from Costco. It worked great up until the very end. There were a couple of times that I had to restart the printer and the computer to get them to re-connect. I don’t know why.

You’ll also need a good shredder and a lof of garbage sacks. I had a total of this filing cabinet you see in this picture and 2 small filing boxes and I filled my recycle can to the top for 2 weeks! I shredded anything with our names on it. Any documents that were less that 8 years old I shredded and did not scan. Everything else got scanned into my computer.

Now, keeping it in your computer is just as stressful because if something goes wrong you’ll lose all of those important files. I uploaded them to my google drive account as password protected docs. You can also use Evernote. In Evernote you can have your docs. password protected. All of my receipts went to Evernote.

Receipts are really annoying to scan unless you have a special scanner. The easiest way I found was to get Evernote on my phone, take a pic and put it in a file according to date and type (dining, equiptment, ect.)

The last thing I did was put my filing cabinet on a website we have here called, KSL. you can use craigslist or whatever’s good in your area. I sold it yesterday! It was totally worth all of the mess and work. We are now a file free family! It feel so good!!