Today I took a step towards organizing and decluttering. I started going through my piles of decorating magazines and ripping out pages for my “Ideas and Inspiration File.” Decorating magazines are the kinds of magazines I like to read. Fashion magazines, not so much. I love all the ideas that decorating magazines have to offer, and I wanted to find a way to keep them all. When I was younger, I just kept all the magazines. When I had my condo back in Massachusetts, a few piles had grown into 5 crates full. When I was starting to plan for moving cross country, I needed to find a way to keep those ideas but lighten the load.
It came to me one day in an office supply store. I bought a 26-pocket accordian file. Twenty-six pockets were plenty for all sorts of different categories. I defined my categories and labeled the pockets. Then I started going through the magazines one by one, ripping out whole pages with ideas that really stood out to me. I decided to keep whole pages for the ease of filing factor, and I used a Sharpie to write on the page exactly what it was that I liked, so that years later I would know what possessed me to keep a particular page. This system works fairly well – I’ve got about 15 years worth of ideas into one accordian file, and there’s room for plenty more.
About 2 years ago, I got very caught up in my life and stopped doing this. I kept the magazines, though – I always keep them until I give them a final go-through. But being that busy, moving in with Mister into the cramped apartment, then moving into our house meant that the magazines continued to pile up without any filing getting done. And that is what I did today – I took a huge pile of magazines downstairs to get to work on this. I got some done, but there’s quite a bit more, and I’m sure that there are even more magazines in boxes that I have yet to unpack.
Every now and then it’s been fun to go through my idea file and see what’s in there. It’s also easy to pull out a category and see that there are definite patterns to what I’m attracted to, decor-wise, which was another huge point of this project. But I still love the fact that all those years of gathering ideas still fits into one accordian file.
I find decluttering very relaxing, don’t you?
Smart way to keep your little ideas handy, I should do the same for recipes, articles etc.
It’s nice to get it done and see some progress. I know I still have more to do, but I’m looking at an empty space on the floor where all those magazines were piled, and it’s very nice.