Back in 2010, I decided the Household Binder system I had been using was too huge and overwhelming to really be helpful.  I separated everything out into smaller binders and found them to be much more manageable.

However, they were lacking 2 things:

1. Beauty
2. Cohesiveness

I’m a visual person who craves efficiency, so these two faults made for a system that didn’t meet my needs, and when a system or method doesn’t meet your needs, you end up not using it as you had intended.

A couple of weeks ago, I sat down with my binders and a pen and paper and brainstormed how I could transform these much-needed binders into something that would work better for me.

Here is what I ended up with…

1 binder for Home Blessing and Maintenance
1 binder for Food and Special Events
1 binder for School
1 binder for Bible Study
1 binder for Blogging

Let me break these down a bit for you, so you can see my reasoning and perhaps find direction for your own household binder system.

Home Blessing and Maintenance Binder

This binder is pink and contains all our cleaning schedules (including our One Day Home Blessing).  It also includes any warranties and maintenance related items.  I do not get this binder down very often because our most used cleaning schedules are on the refrigerator door.

Food and Special Events

This binder is green and contains the heart and soul of our kitchen.  My master grocery and meal lists are, my coupons, my recipes I want to try, my eCookbooks that have been printed out all reside here.  This binder also contains any plans I need to make for special events in our household because as we all know, special events often involve food!  This binder gets a lot of love and a lot grime and splatters!

School

This binder is white and contains our weekly lesson plans, any interesting articles I’ve gathered, and a lot of scratch paper for me to pour my thoughts onto.

Bible Study

This notebook is black and contains a lot of scratch paper, my schedule for reading through the Bible in a year, and any eDevotionals I’ve printed out.

Blogging

This notebook is purple and contains anything internet and blog related. I have 2 separate folders within this notebook for each of my blogs: Raising Arrows and Homeschool Blogging.  It contains numerous lists for projects, posts I plan to write, income/expense sheets, ads/giveaways, and other notes of interest (like the fact that this is the last week you can take advantage of the 10% off coupon code – ramarch – for DrinkBands).  When I attend conferences where I will also be working as a promotional blogger, I take this binder along for notes as well, because honestly homeschool conventions inspire much of what I write.

In addition to having different colored binders for each notebook, I also added spine labels and front covers that were pretty.  That was one big gripe I had with my old binders.  They were thrown together hastily and were downright ugly.  These binders makes me happy.

It’s the simple things in life, really.

So, I want to know…

Do you have a binder system?
Do you have a homemaking post that might be of interest to Raising Arrows readers?

Time to link up!