How To Organize Instruction Manuals

Hello again!  We're almost half way through the week - thaaaaank goodness!  I have been slowly reorganizing things around the house since the holidays wreaked havoc here.  Not to brag (ahem), but one of my strong points is that I'm super organized.  Everything has a place and I like to keep them in their place and out of sight (but, let's be real.  My house is not perfect and it's often a mess as I'm in the middle of projects or reorganizing).  As I slowly get things in order, I'll be sharing some tips and tricks with you.

Over the last month, I purchased a brand-spankin-new appliance and a few kitchen gadgets, so a few more instruction manuals are now added to my collection.  I decided to reorganize how I store them since it was a getting a tad messy.  At first, I kept everything in my filing cabinet.  I decided that I wanted them all together in one central spot that was easy to get to.  My next idea was to put them in a 3 ring binder using page protectors.  But, some of the manuals were too big to fit inside the page protectors and some of them were small & made the pages kind of flimsy when turning them.  I wasn't happy with that.  On to Plan C - I bought this expanding file at Walmart.  Yeah, it's not the prettiest thing, but that's Walmart for ya and I'm on a budget.  Sometimes beggers cannot be choosers.

It has a nice front pocket that is good for holding those thicker manuals.

I've been using it for about a year and it's been working out very nicely.  It's currently stored in my Craft room's mini-office on the top shelf.  But, look at how thick this puppy is.

It was becoming a pain to take it down and put it back each time I needed to get something from it (which is somewhat often).  And I never even use that front pocket, which was taking up a lot of space.  So, I got the idea to just cut it off.  I figure I can re-use it for storing items together from scrapbooking projects or for something else.

Much better!  It made a big difference.

I took everything out of and made 6 piles by subject/type.  Once that was done, I made labels for the tabs on each section (for some reason, I never did this when I first started using it).  I didn't get too fancy with the labels - just hand wrote them.

Then I got my old school label maker...

...and made a super fancy label for my reorganized file.

Hmmm, this might be hard to read but my super fancy label says "Instruction Manuals".   Ok,  ok.  You got me - it's not super fancy, but I had to hype it up.

So, it's not pretty and cute, but it's functional, keeps all the manuals in one spot, and best of all, it works for me.

Linked up to:
I Heart Organizing's Home Office Organization link party

Delightful Order's Organizing Papers link party