This week Simple Mom challenged us to tackle our paper clutter in her 5 week project: simplify series.

I actually went through a bit paper organizing spree recently so the majority of my impressive purging isn’t available for photographing (which is not to say that my desk is not messy, by the way, but it’s an organized mess in my mind. Anyway, I decided to spend this week on two paper clutter hogs in our home that I’ve been avoiding since most of my clutter is currently under control.

Those area: our fire safe which previously could barely shut it was so full with papers that really didn’t need to be there ; and our file cabinet which was becoming a bit of a beast and getting fuller every day. I combed through every paper and made sure they were in the right place and / or necessary.

Wanna see the results?

Our Fire Safe Before and After:

Some major purging happened in this small fire safe. Days before my husband had commented that we were going to need a bigger fire safe. Now it’s barely half full. There were dozens of papers in here that were really better kept in our file cabinet (yikes!) and some were even old and unimportant enough to head to the shredder. Another ginormous thing taking up space in here:

All of these boxes are filled with old checkbooks for accounts that are no longer active. Do I throw them away? Do I tediously tear out the pages and shred them? Are they recyclable? I need to figure this out. But I don’t need to keep them in the fire safe. In fact, I might be secretly relieved if these were to burn up and disappear. Bon fire? lol

So, anyway, my fire safe is much happier now and closes easily. Next it was time to tackle the file cabinet which groans every time I file a new paper.

File Cabinet Before and After

I know these pictures don’t really do a great job showing you that anything changed. I’m sorry, I kinda flat lined on the picture part, being sort of consumed by the Oh My God So Many Papers. The sad thing is that despite all the stuff I got rid of, because of the papers I needed to file previously in the fire safe, it’s still almost as full. But At least I know the stuff in there is quasi-important and organized. One thing I did to squeeze a bit more room in here is go through the folders and make sure none of the papers were folded. We have a bad habit of just shoving the folded up bill into the file instead of laying it out flat. This gave me a lot more room. I also moved files that were less important to the back of the drawer so that our more important and more often used files were in the front.

The Paperwork Monster Killing didn’t yield quite the same immediately observable results as my Closet Cleaning, but it was just as necessary and the results speak for themselves in action, if not quite in appearance. I actually shredded as much stuff as I could, rather than throwing it away, btw, because we’re planning to try using the shredded paper as packing material next month.

Have you tackled the paper clutter in your home recently? What’s the biggest offender in paper clutter for you?