The KonMari Method: Paper

Well that went well. Mostly. We had paper everywhere! We definitely still have paper up in the girls’ rooms but we’re ignoring that until they’re both here and can participate in the Kondoing of their paper. I’m sure we’ll also find more paper tucked away in various places as we move through the process but the bulk of it is DONE.

I gathered up the paper from our desks, from our bedside tables, from the cubby in the bedroom, from various junk drawers throughout the house, the two plastic file boxes jam packed full of “important papers”, and from the drawers of TW’s dresser in the cold room.

We ended up with three bags of trash and a bag and a half of paper to shred. We also have a box of “sentimental papers” to go through at the end.

One of the file boxes is completely empty and the other isn’t even close to being full. We also stumbled upon dozens of gift cards and I’ve gone through the annoyingly tedious process of checking to see if any of them have balances — most do. The ones that didn’t, were cut and thrown away so we don’t have to go through that process again. I’m pretty sure there are more gift cards in the “sentimental” box because our sorting piles got a little confused for a few minutes and I was not going to go back through the box to find a few darn gift cards. We’ll deal with them later.

I’m pretty pleased with our progress. Now I just have to decide if there’s a community shredding event scheduled in the near future at a time that’s convenient for us to go shred. Or, if we should just buy a shredder… I’m leaning toward NOT buying a shredder but I want this stuff out of the house ASAP. It defeats the purpose of sorting it and bagging it if you’re just going to leave the crap sitting around in bags. Hmph.

Next up: DVDs, VHS tapes, CDs, albums and video games… those are all over the house, too. (What isn’t?)