Sorry Shredder…What would I do Without You?

I love getting ready to move. It gives me a chance to purge, reorganize, and rearrange. With one week to go, I am starting to feel the moving crunch take hold.

Today I tackled the office…a small 9’x9’ room one third occupied by workout equipment, one third occupied by Little People toys, and one third occupied by office “stuff.” It was the office stuff I was concerned with: the overflowing “in-box” shelves, the messy desk, the stuffed file cabinet, and the computer program disks strewn about the book shelf.

I tend to be a keeper of papers. If the kids scribbled on it, it must be preserved. I am equally bad with our financial paperwork. I’m trying to do better. After leaving our house in central-Washington and downsizing nearly 500 sqft, I’ve learned that some things must go. I don’t have the space to keep every scribbled-with-love paper or the water bill from eight years ago.

According to Bankrate.com, it’s okay to purge your financial documents from time to time. They have a great chart on when you can part with those bank statements, tax forms, and gas bills.

Though it took me nearly all day, the in-box shelves are empty, the desk is cleared, the file folders are purged, and the information from our old floppy disks have been transferred to CD. The poor Recycle-man/woman won’t be too happy with me tomorrow morning. We have 4 paper bags full of recyclable paper (not including junk mail and newspapers) and 3 bags of shredded documents, with more paper to shred when the shredder has recovered from today’s duties.

Although purging always feels good, I’m glad I won’t need to have another paper purge for quite a while. I’m just hoping that I will have a place for all the paperwork in our new home. Right now the papers have a place to hide where I can just close the door if they start to get out of hand. Our beautiful open floor plan in the new house won’t accommodate games of hide-and-seek with stacks of paper…there’s nowhere to hide!