Beginning my Binder

I have had the craziest week ever. All because of school. More specifically, all because I had a quiz yesterday on the bones of the skull and dentition. Not just the bones, but every little dent or hole or joint or anything else you could possibly think of in the skull. Do you know how complex our skulls are?!?! Wow, who knew? I do, now. Our assignment was to color-code a bunch of study sheets. I ran out of colored pencils in my box of 50 when I was about halfway done. There were 10 pages in this coloring packet. That's how complex our skull and teeth are. It was a pain in the butt to memorize it all, but it sure makes me wonder how people can study anatomy and not believe in God. It's crazy how everything works together perfectly!

Anyway, where was I going with this? Oh yeah, studying took up every spare moment of my week, and almost gave me a nervous breakdown. I wish I were exaggerating. It's been a crazy week and I know I've been irritable and hard to live with, so I hope my husband understands!

Getting off track again. I had such a crazy week that I'm glad I took some time last weekend to start my home organizing binder!!

Our lives need to be simplified. Right now, I have my couponing stuff jammed in a little section of my desk. My recipes are all on Pinterest, so I have to bring my laptop (oh btw, I got a new laptop this week!!!) into the kitchen every time I make a new dish. Luke takes care of our budget, so that stuff is always up in the living room stashed away somewhere. Our checkbook could be virtually anywhere in the house, and we can never find it when we need it. And our bills are strewn haphazardly alllll over Luke's desk.

Obviously, we are making things much more difficult than they have to be. My goal with the binder is to keep it simple and get everything in one place.

The section I decided to start with is the couponing section, so I thought I'd share that today. It was really easy to set up! I had been keeping my coupons in little envelopes, so I had to dig through the envelopes every time I was looking for a specific coupon, and it was very time consuming. So I decided to do what I've seen a lot other couponers do and use little baseball card inserts. I don't know why I didn't do this a long time ago. Now all of my coupons are visible and organized. I don't take the whole binder to the store with me, but I just take out the ones I know I'll be using on a shopping trip and put them in a small envelope that fits in my purse. Since I'm not an "extreme couponer," this works just fine for me.

So let's take a look inside my binder. I do hope to make it a little "cuter" in the future, but my life is too busy for cute right now :-)

When you first open the binder, you see our grocery budget sheets for the month. I like to do this so we can quickly see how much money we have left in the budget. And it's also fun to see how far we come in below budget at the end of the month! We've been between $100 and $250 under every month since July! Couponing does make a difference, people! :-)

I also keep a little envelope in this section where I can put all my grocery receipts

And here are my coupons! After I had already organized them by product, I realized it might have been a better idea to organize them by expiration date. Oh well, I can always change it if I find that this organizational system doesn't work for me.

So that's it! It feels really good to at least have one section started. I think this is a project that will be constantly evolving and changing as I add things and re-work things. Making a home-organizing binder is kind of a trial and error thing, and it changes as life changes.

I am currently working on the menu/recipe section and the budget/bills section, so I'll update as soon as those are complete!

I am getting most of my inspiration for the home binder HERE. Check it out...so many great and cute ideas!

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And this is totally unrelated, but I posted at My Twenties Blog today about Columbus! We are writing about our state this month, so go check it out :-)