The wife has a filing cabinet that has been crammed with everything paperwork for as long as I’ve known her. It is about five feet high and about four feet wide, with three drawers. (1.52 meters high, 1.24 meters wide). Her daughters lie in mortal terror of their mother dying and leaving them to have to clean out the filing cabinet.
Well, we had a little time this afternoon, so … we started cleaning out the old paperwork from the filing cabinet.
This thing is crammed to the gills with everything you can think of.
We do have a guideline we use when cleaning out old papers. We keep anything from within the last seven years. That is the general rule of thumb for this task. It seems if you get audited for your taxes, or have other legal issues, having paperwork for the last seen years can be useful. I also look for paper that has a blank page. I can use it as note paper. I also have a project or two I intend to use it for. I really need to wok on my handwriting. It has gone to pot over the years and is barely legible. I also am using it to doodle and work on my drawing skills. I’m also looking to see how many file folders we might be able to reuse.
We started with the bottom drawer. I’d pull out a file folder and hand it to the wife. She has to do most of the sorting for keep / throw away because they are her files and I don’t know what she needs or considers important. I basically am there to hand her file folders, then take any papers she is getting rid of and putting them in the trash, then put the remaining papers in the file folder back in the cabinet.
We got through maybe a third of the bottom drawer before calling it quits. It doesn’t sound like much but it was a lot more than we’ve ever been able to get through before. I was surprised at how much we got thrown away.
Another interesting tidbit we found – remember when I told you about the wife inviting me to see Godspell? Well, we found the playbook for the performance. The wife thinks I should try to sell it on eBay. I know playbills for big productions on Broadway sell well there, but a small venue in Houston that shut down in 2012? I doubt it, unless someone wants it purely for historical or nostalgic purposes.
We will continue with the Filing Cabinet Of Dooooom! as time permits. I’m hopeful that with a little diligent effort every day we’ll have it cleaned out in no time.
How about you, my Hordeling? Got any major projects you’ve been putting off? Leave a comment and let me know.
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