April 18 2019

Organizing Recipes and Cookbooks

When the kids were getting ready to go off to college, I thought they might want to have copies of the recipes they had learned to cook during their teen years. I began typing recipes into the computer a few at a time and sorting them within the Word doc so that all the beef recipes were together and the chicken recipes were in another section. I listed the recipes in the table of contents under the correct heading. Someday when I consider it finished, I may add page numbers, but for now, everything is just sorted into the correct section in the order they appear.

I decided that the cookbook I was amassing needed to be printed out and inserted into sheet protectors. I started each new section on a new page so that if I needed to update a section I could just print a new copy and replace the old one. I also decided that each copy needed to be put in a binder and so each one also needed a custom cover to match up with its new owner.

One of the perks of having the recipes I use all the time already typed into the computer is the ease with which I can share them electronically with someone. In fact, if I take something to a pitch-in that I think might be popular, I often email the recipe to myself before leaving home to make it extra easy to share while on the go. All I have to do is forward the email to someone if they want the recipe, or if they want to write it out, I can simply let them copy it from the email on my phone. This saves me having to remember to do it later and they get the recipe right away.

Once in a while, the old ratty recipe card is of historical significance, so I type the recipe AND include a scan of the original so I have both preserved. You may ask why I bother typing it in if I am going to include the scan. Easy, it is searchable that way. I can search my entire computer based on some unique word in the recipe and find it quickly.

The other thing I have done in the past to organize recipes is to buy a Rolodex that uses three by five cards and alphabet tabs. I found that I could use a hole punch and then scissors to make preprinted recipe cards work in this system. Only occasionally was it a problem because it would cut into the type on the bottom of the card. You might be wondering how well that worked for organizing the recipes. Well, what can I say, C is for cookie and cake and cheese and casserole and…let’s just say that sometimes you have to check behind more than one tab to find what you are looking for and often you have to search through all the recipes filed behind a specific tab until you find the one you want.

The is my Rolodex. It is a little cracked on the right front of the lid and as you can see I don’t always punch the cards and don’t always file them back where they belong either. I have a clear acrylic recipe card holder that I put them in while I am using them and then, in theory, file them away when I am finished with them.

I have included scans of two recipe cards from my Rolodex to show you what they look like. The colored card was hand-written by me and punched and cut many years later to make it fit the filing system. I put it behind the white one that came in the Rolodex so you could see how I knew where to punch and cut it and also so you could see the pre-punched cards and what they look like. Feel free to try the recipes too.

I also am guilty of tearing entire pages out of magazines because there was a recipe I wanted to try on it and I was ready to throw the rest of the magazine into the recycling bin. These can easily go in sheet protectors in the binder also, and if you test the recipe and love it you can type it up in the correct section in the cookbook with a proper source citing of course. If you don’t care for it, no problem, just add it to the recycle bin too.

Every so often, I go through the recipes I’ve kept because they sounded good and I wanted to try them and decide that I’ll never actually make it because it contains unusual ingredients or too many ingredients. If you know you won’t make it, just chuck it. No need to let it clutter your recipe filing system.

Do you have a system that works for organizing your recipes?

 

Category: Organizing, Recipes | Comments Off on Organizing Recipes and Cookbooks
March 21 2019

Organizing Your Records for Tax Time

I know this may be a little late for some and a little early for others. It is timely for me because we are going to get our taxes done in a week and need to gather everything up to be ready for our tax appointment.

So what do you need to do to get ready to do your taxes? Well, I keep an empty file folder in the file drawer year-round that says “Current Year Taxes”. Any time throughout the year that we get a receipt for a charitable donation or something else that we know we will need for our taxes, I can just drop it in and never have to worry about where I put it when the time comes. This system has been working well for us for many years.

One year I got the brilliant idea to list everything that we actually used during our tax appointment in the order the tax guy requested it so that next year I would have a checklist and know when we had everything we needed to do the taxes. This addition to the folder system has worked better than I ever thought it would. Some years I realize that something has changed, so the list gets updated from time to time.

Basically, my list is in outline form as shown below. We actually list out the names of employers, banks, retirement accounts and such to make it as specific as possible.

Things Needed for Taxes:

Wages

  • Job 1 W2
  • Job 2 W2

Interest (1099s)

  • Checking Account
  • Savings Account
  • Investment Account
  • Retirement Account

Mortgage Interest

  • Home Mortgage

Taxes Paid

  • State Income Tax Refund
  • Excise Tax on all vehicles

Charitable Contributions

  • Church
  • College

Deductions

  • Work Tools
  • Mileage
  • Medical Bills
  • Not-For-Profit Charities
  • Tuition Expenses
  • 529 College Savings Plan

So this is by no means a complete list, but it is the bare bones of what we gather up with a few additions of things I know others need to have to complete their taxes. If you haven’t done your taxes yet, make yourself a list in your computer and gather each item up as you add it to the list. When you do your taxes this year, see what needs changed on your list or added to it. Find a large envelope or folder of some sort to keep your list and documents together. If you’ve already gotten your taxes done this year, you can set up this system to make it even easier for you next year.

If you see anything that I missed on the list or have a better system, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to contact me or leave a comment below.

Category: Organizing, Planning | Comments Off on Organizing Your Records for Tax Time
January 17 2019

Putting Away the Holiday

Now don’t laugh, but we still have our Christmas tree up and we are even “those people”. Yep, “those people” who not only haven’t taken down their holiday decorations, but are also still lighting them up for all the world to see well after the middle of January.

Why are they still up? Because we are too busy or too lazy perhaps to take them down and put them away. At this point, the closest we’ve gotten is Hubby bringing the tubs for the decorations down from the attic. I thought I might get ambitious and put a tub full away each night this week, then we could take down the tree over the weekend.

It just hasn’t happened. Between working and the commute to and from work, dealing with snow last weekend, and trying to get dinner on the table and have some time to myself each evening, it just hasn’t happened. So what is my plan since the last one didn’t work out too well? More snow. We are supposed to get more snow this weekend again and I get to work from home on Monday since it’s a holiday. I figure since I won’t have to commute, I can use the extra hour to work on packing away the holiday.

What I don’t plan to pack away again is the holiday mugs that have been packed away for several years to the point that we forgot we had them. Only a couple are even meaningful to us. We might keep those couple and donate the rest to charity.

I want to number or label the tubs so I can make inventory lists for them to tell me exactly which tub each item is in, but honestly that likely will not happen this year.  I did pull a few things that we weren’t using this year and didn’t need to keep out to donate as we were going through the decorations deciding what needed to come out and be put to use and what could go. I think evaluating each item when you are getting stuff out or putting it back is a good plan.

Most of our ornaments, ok probably only about half of them, get packed away in their original boxes each year as a way to protect them from dust and debris, then those little individual boxes are packed into a large plastic tub/tote.

While I’m thinking of it, my favorite thing about our Christmas tree every year is the rotating stand. I LOVE it because it allows us to fill the entire tree with ornaments and you can tell it’s moving even from out on the street and it is really a cool effect. Because it is always rotating, you get to watch the ornaments go by as it rotates. Now I’m sure at least one of you is thinking to yourself that it would never work because the tree lights would wind themselves around the base of the tree, but the manufacturers thought about that and the lights plug into the base that rotates so the lights rotate with the rest of the tree.

So, if, like us you still haven’t packed away the holiday, whichever one(s) you celebrate, let’s challenge ourselves to get it down before the month ends. Leave a comment below and let us know if you have finished putting it all away. Remember when you get busy, be kind to future you, declutter as you go.

Category: Organizing | 1 Comment on Putting Away the Holiday
November 15 2018

Holiday Organizing

Holiday Organizing

As we approach the holiday season, many of you will be decorating your homes for the holidays. Over the years, I have learned a thing or two about getting organized for the holidays.

Years ago, I got some green and red tubs to put away the decorations after the holidays were over so they would be easy to locate in the attic or basement. Before then, we used an assortment of cardboard boxes to store our decorations. The tubs were larger and had nice handles which made fewer trips up and down the attic or basement steps and the handles made them easier and safer to carry.

Believe it or not, we have a black and orange tub to store the fall and Halloween decorations and a pastel yellow tub to store spring and Easter decorations. Yep, these are obvious when stacked among other tubs and easy to find or send someone else to get.

This year as you get out your decorations think about those that you choose not to put out and consider WHY you aren’t using them this year. Maybe they just don’t suit your tastes or style of decorating anymore. Maybe they belong to your kids and you need to sort those into a tub for each of your children so they will have a tub of their own to start their decoration collection with when they move into a home of their own. We have a few ornaments that are very breakable family treasures that we rarely put on our tree because we don’t want to take a chance on breaking them. As I am writing this and thinking of those ornaments, it occurs to me that these will have no meaning to our kids because they were never a part of our holiday decorating. I am now asking myself what I am saving them for. This is the year we either use it or lose it. If it doesn’t fit neatly into the tubs we already have to store our decorations in, then we will need to declutter some things so we can keep others.

Another quick tip is to attach a list of what is in each box or at least label them (ornaments, garland, lights, nativity, etc.). You could use double-sided tape to attach a sheet protector and then slide the lists in and out as needed while keeping it clean, dry and protected.

We have done this every few years and we got to the point where we realized the ornaments our kids were getting each year were over-crowding our tubs and the kids needed their own, so I waited for the lovely red and green tubs to go on deeply discounted sale and bout one for each of them. Then we took a huge black permanent marker and wrote each kid’s name on the lid and tub their ornaments would now be stored in.

If that kid didn’t take the time to put their decorations on the tree then they didn’t get used. The kids were also in charge of taking their ornaments off the tree each year and putting them away in the boxes they came in to keep them nice. This is always something of a trip down memory lane as they remember the things that were going on in their lives during those years. Their great-grandmother and grandma each chose ornaments for each of them every year. The ornaments were usually Hallmark ornaments. Occasionally if we found an ornament that had particular meaning for one of them we would also get them an ornament. Because the kids were in charge of hanging their own ornaments each year, they remember them and will have those memories for the rest of their lives. I would tell the kids as they packed their ornaments away that first year that they should also put any ornament they personally made in their tubs and let me know if there was anything, in particular, they wanted to keep that had special meaning to them but didn’t specifically belong to them.

Last year, we never got around to putting the tree up and it was oddly sad not seeing it, but very nice not having to put it away either. It was the only year I can ever remember not having decorated the house for the holiday season.

Now we don’t get carried away, we usually just set up the artificial tree and decorate it, hang the stockings and set out some decorations on the mantel and tabletops in the living room. We don’t have tons of stuff and it can usually be put up or taken down in an afternoon or evening. I like the get it set up over Thanksgiving weekend and Hubby doesn’t like to have it taken down before the twelfth day of Christmas for some reason. I usually like it down sometime around new years, but I usually let him keep it up longer.

So when it comes to organizing your holiday decorations you need to set aside a time and add it to your calendar to do the decorating and un-decorating. You also need to make a list of things you will need like wrapping paper, tape, bows, gift boxes or whatever you use. Do you need to buy stamps to mail letters or cards? Is your address list current? Do you need to get updated addresses for that cousin that bought a house this year? Schedule in ten or fifteen minutes a day to do something to make this year’s holiday season go smoother. Do you have the recipes you will make gathered up? Have you been adding the non-perishable items to your shopping list each week so the grocery budget doesn’t explode the end of December? What are the things you can do ahead of time to save yourself the added stress later?

Do you know where you are going on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day? What days do you and your family members have off work? Are there programs you need to attend? Add them all to your calendar. Do you need to make reservations for dinner somewhere? How about tickets to the show or event you want to attend? Do you plan to donate your time ringing a bell, wrapping gifts, shopping for those less fortunate, serving meals at a soup kitchen? Add it all to your calendar. It would be a shame to miss something you want to do because it wasn’t on your calendar and in the business of the season it slipped your mind.

If you take the time to make your lists and check them twice over the next week or two, you will be amazed at how much smoother everything goes and how much less stressed you feel and how much more enjoyable the season can be. You owe it to yourself to get organized for the holidays. Yes, YOU are worth it!

In case you missed these recent holiday related posts, be sure to take a minute to read them by clicking the links below.

Are the Holidays a Burden?
Saving for the Holidays

If you have been reading this blog very long it probably isn’t a surprise that I am pre-writing some of the November Thursday posts so I can focus on writing a 50,000-word novel in 30 days (NaNoWriMo). Stay tuned and add yourself to the email list in the near the upper right of this page so you can be notified by email when I post something new and can read it right in your email if you choose.

Category: Family, Organizing, Planning | Comments Off on Holiday Organizing
September 20 2018

Kitchen Cabinet Organizing

When we bought our house December 2000, the kitchen was still in the half-finished state it had been in for the previous nine years since my in-laws stopped working on remodeling it for health reasons. The floor was exposed wood because the previous flooring was no longer visible, having long since worn away. Some of the walls had wallpaper and some were still bare drywall. The wooden paneling, that was meant to cover ALL the walls on the lower half, was only installed behind the cabinets on one side of the room. The cabinets used to be new on the outside wall, but they were never quite the right fit for the wall, so there has always been a three-inch gap between the stove and the cabinet next to it on one side or the other. My in-laws also chose a lovely country blue colored countertop, but the blue has worn away in many places on the countertop that gets the most use. I wish I could say those issues have all been dealt with over the almost eighteen years we have lived here, but that just isn’t the case.

There is one wall of built-in cabinets that my in-laws lovingly refinished and those are the ones we will focus on for this decluttering session.

Continue reading

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