Organizing 101

My New Year's resolution this year was to get better organized. In past years, this simply meant buying a book on organization and leaving it on my night stand for a few months until I got tired of looking at it and then putting it downstairs on our book self never to be looked at again.

Organization does not come naturally to me. I really wish it did - I'm working on it, but I'm so envious of my friends (ahem - Jamie, Christine!) who are just organized. Who actually like to clean and organize their homes. I am slowly working on it this year and have begun organizing different parts of our house. We don't have a large home and I'm constantly trying to de-clutter and make our space work for us.

One of the bigger projects I tackled this year has been a recipe book. We probably have 20 cook books and use maybe 5-10 recipes in each book. We have tons of index cards filled with recipes and magazine pages floating around in my recipe drawer with meals I've been meaning to cook. I have been meaning to make a recipe book for years now but just never found the time.

I finally decided that last week was going to be the week. I have spent every minute I have this past week looking through every single recipe I have. I would attach a sticky note to every recipe book and jot down the recipes from that book that I either love or have wanted to try. I then photocopied all those recipes and sold the cook books at Barnes and Noble. I printed off every recipe I have added to my google reader (the program that lets you know when any blog you read has been updated) and went through all the loose papers in my drawers and recycled the ones I knew I would never make.

The remaining recipes went into our new binder! I used the money I made with selling my cook books and went to Staples to buy a binder, paper protectors and scrap booking paper (to be used as dividers). I printed out tabs for - breakfast, appetizers, soups, salads, sides, veggies, pasta, Mexican, seafood, chicken, beef, pork and desserts.

And it's done!