Week 3 of decluttering: The Paperwork and Filing Cabinet

So, according to my wonderful husband, filing all the paperwork is not 'decluttering' because it's already in a neat pile. I will never understand the logic of men sometimes (sorry Chris ;)) In my defence, I filed this huge pile of paperwork AND cleaned out the filing cabinet at the same time! I hate filing paperwork with a passion (and I suspect I'm not the only one). This pile has been building up for probably a year and it was well and truly time to do something about it.

The first job was to sort the pile into paperwork to shred and paperwork to file. I stacked all the similar things into piles and then put them into date order, ready to go into the filing cabinet. Luckily I'd tidied the bench for our Easter lunch and it wasn't covered by all my craft stuff.

The paperwork all sorted into similar piles and ready to file

After I'd sorted out the pile, I went through the files in the cabinet and threw out some of the older paperwork that didn't need to be kept anymore. I've started to only keep paperwork for a certain amount of time as it gets a little out of control otherwise.

The stack of stuff to shred!

I ended up with a huge pile of paperwork to shred! This pile is just the beginning as I ended up adding more to it. Luckily I had willing helpers to help me shred the paper. We put most of the shredded paperwork into the recycling bin but we also used a bit of it in the worm farm, now that's recycling!

Putting the paper through the shredder kept the kids amused for ages!

I'll have to look at getting more of our bills electronically in the future (we do already get some this way) as doing all this has made me realise just how much paper is used and wasted!