The Kitchen Book - Setting It Up

Okay, so before I started on my kitchen book, I did a lot of thinking about what I wanted in it. I took a look at FlyLady's suggestions but I'm impatient, so I did it all at once (well, over the course of a week once I decided what I was doing).

Before you start, think about what will work best for you. We keep ours in the kitchen, so I wanted to make sure it wasn't going to get completely ruined by water or smell from the cooking smells. If yours is going to live somewhere else - a bookcase near your desk, a drawer in the living room or whatever - you might not be as worried about waterproofness.

We started out with a 1" binder, a package of tabbed dividers and some sheet protectors. About four months later our binder has become two - a 1" and a 1 1/2" - (I'll get to that in a later post), two kinds of tabbed dividers (numbered to 7 and alphabet), sheet protectors and plastic pockets.


I love the sheet protectors and the plastic pockets are awesome!

I made sure the main binder had pouches inside the front cover (it has them inside the back too, but I'm not as worried about that). The front cover has any (non-bill) correspondence we need to deal with, stamps and return address labels in it. We have a stationery drawer, so if we need paper or envelopes, that's where they are, not in the pouch because they'd take up too much space.

Once you've got your supplies, you're ready to go! I started my book as some scribbles on a piece of paper - information we needed to give to a sitter or stuff that Alex would call me at work to find out or I'd call him to find out. I decided it should be in one easy to use, easy to find place instead of on scraps of papers or stored in our brains somehow.

So, grab a piece of paper or email me for my template or make your own...it's time to make a kitchen/house/control book for you!