More Wisdom for Creating that Greeting Card Binder

As it’s been mentioned in passing before, I keep a binder for my greeting cards and I find it to be very helpful.

In the front of my “Greeting Card” binder is a list of all the birthdays and holidays that require a greeting card purchase, (or kid created greeting card), by month. Behind the list I keep 12 heavy-duty clear sheet protectors that are labeled at the top right corner with the months of the year. Then there are more sheet protectors labeled by occasion, “thank you,” “blank,” “friendship,” “sympathy,” etc. Shopping for cards seems to be one of my biggest mommy challenges. My kids do not have much patience for watching me read card after card looking for the perfect witty choice for a friend. When I am hurridly searching for a funny birthday card for my father-in-law but in the process come upon the perfect card for my girlfriend, Anne, I will buy it even though her birthday isn’t for several months. When I get home the card I found for Anne gets filed under January for her birthday. So, you get the idea.

I thought I was just so nifty with my little Greeting Card binder until my friend Anne called me with some ways to perfect it. She is my go-to bargain hunting friend so she always has the ins and outs on how to get the most out of retail stores which I just tend to try to avoid but sometimes fail. American Greeting stores are having a buy 3 cards get 3 free sale right now. (An even cheaper way to go is to have your kids make your cards for you of course but sometimes you want an actual greeting card.) If you can put aside an hour or so without kids, take a list of all your greeting cards dates with you to your local American Greeting store, or any bargain card store that you prefer, and buy ALL of your greeting cards for at least an entire year and file them in your greeting card binder. While you're reading a zillion cards, be sure to poke around in the congratulations, thank you and other card categories and find some that you'd like to file away. They aren’t likely to have Mother’s Day and Father’s Day cards or other holiday-specific cards but you can have your kids make those. Also, with everyone using online bill pay it seems more likely that you are without a stamp for a greeting card. Just tuck some forever stamps in the front of your greeting card binder and you can eliminate that problem as well. These are two tips I know will definitely eliminate my forgetting a card event or scrambling around at the last minute to get one.

More Great Uses for Binders

The usefulness of binders is nearly endless when it comes to keeping order with just about any kind of paper. I thought I had exhausted all possible uses for binders in my house until my friend, Denise, said to me, “Now, you DO have a binder for each of your kids don’t you?” I said, " No,” and thought that I wouldn’t know what to put in a binder for my kids. She explained that she keeps schedules and activities and medical information in her kids’ binders and I thought that was great but I didn’t have a need for such a thing. Shortly after that conversation the school year truly commenced. Oh boy. Papers from school were flying! Then, I recalled the kids’ binder idea and got some old binders out and organized some of the kids’ papers. My two school aged kids now have a binder with their name on it. In the front of their binders I put academic reference materials that are helpful to both them and me concerning how their teacher wants homework completed and returned and a letter and number chart, home address, phone number, etc., for my kindergartner to glance at. The binders also have tabs for each subject that they study in school and I have put some math, reading and writing sheets that I printed out for free from online websites behind each subject tab and some “Parent Tips” sheets that have come home for a few subjects. I now have a place to put all the religion papers that we can review regularly. I even put a tab marked “$$” so they can keep track of their bank accounts and such all in one place. Behind a “Misc.” tab we can find girl scout fliers, boy scout papers and flag football information. (A list of team members and plays their coach wants them to learn). All the papers are easily visible in those handy-dandy clear sheet protectors. It is one of those organizing projects that brought me such peace and when I showed my husband where he can find such things he didn’t laugh at my organizing for once. He nodded so as to say “Good! Now I know where to look for those things.”

Fabulous Bulletin Boards!

I can not imagine running my house without a bulletin board or two, (or three or four). I suppose a lot of people put papers in sight with magnets on their fridge but that just feels cluttered to me so I prefer to use a bulletin board. If you don’t think that the papers you have on your fridge make your house feel cluttered and the fact that they fall off now and again when the fridge doors are opened, try this. Clear your fridge of every magnet, paper and doodad and clean the doors and the exposed sides of your fridge. Now look at it. Doesn’t that feel good? Ahhh. I can’t explain why a bulletin board with papers tacked to it is better visually than a fridge with the same papers magnetized to it but it just is.


The paper clutter issue bugs nearly everyone I know. If it isn’t the papers on the fridge then it’s the papers piled on the counter that is bugging them. A bulletin board can be one of the first steps in solving a paper clutter issue. I have a couple of small corkboard squares inside my computer armiore for passwords, receipts that I want to put into my pricebook, laminated Nicene Creed, and other papers and notes that relate to anything I will be doing on the computer. The kitchen, being central station of our house, has a prettier pottery barn bulletin where I keep our pocket calendar, my son’s class schedule, beatitudes ( We can always use a reminder of those), a photo or two, gym exercise class schedule, basketball game schedule and any school papers that require attention in the immediate future. My bigger kids have a small bulletin board in each of their rooms for motivational sticker charts, routine charts and calendars. Bulletin boards keep paper easy to find and prevent paper clutter from growing on horizontal surfaces. Even if your bulletin board gets cluttered, it will seem less cluttered visually than having a counter or table cluttered with paper piles.

Extraordinary Uses for Binders

Binders can organize so many things. If you have some shelf real estate to plop them on they are so accessible and have so much potential. Of course there are obvious uses for binders. I use several for recipes. I have one binder labeled “Culinary Experiments” (recipes I have not yet tried but intend to), another “Culinary Collections” (the tried and true recipes), and one for “Desserts and Breads.” I don’t get bogged down with details like cutting and pasting recipes. I just slide cardstock in clear protector sheets and put the cut out recipes on top so they are easier to read. I don’t paste or anything, that way if my Culinary Experiment recipe is a success I can easily slide it out and move it to the Culinary Collections binder.

I used to enjoy browsing through home magazines (who has time for that now with three kids?) and I would always tear out a picture of something that I really liked. I have a “Home Ideas” binder that includes several categories of my magazine tear outs. The tabs include “Architecture,” “Gardening,” “Decorating Projects,” and “Gift Ideas.” The binder came in very handy when we moved into our untouched 1970s house that was in terrible need of a new kitchen. I had collected pictures of kitchens that I liked for years and even though I didn’t know exactly why I liked the pictures, it gave the cabinet makers a place to start when trying to figure out what we wanted.

The best housewarming gift ever given to us was a binder labeled Menus. Several years ago we moved from the east coast to the Midwest when I was 8 months pregnant. A friend of ours drove around our new town before we arrived and gathered take out menus. Not only did she put the menus in clear protector sheets in a binder that was cleverly decorated in old photos but she even categorized the menus by food type: Italian, Chinese, Sandwich Places, etc. This binder is a permanent fixture in our house.

My most recent binder creation of a couple years ago is labeled “Greeting Cards.” In the front I have a sheet that lists everyone’s birthdays by month and I included greeting card holidays like mother’s day and father’s day by month. Behind that sheet I have 17 clear protector pocket sheets. Each clear pocket is labeled with my handy dandy label maker at the top right hand corner. The first twelve are labeled the months of the year, then there are clear pockets for blank cards, generic birthday cards (those that aren’t for anyone specific), get well cars, sympathy cards and thank you cards. So, you know how sometimes you will be looking for a birthday card for Amy and as you are reading them you come across the perfect card for Jim? Well now I can get the perfect card that I found for Jim even though his birthday isn’t for another 10 months because I have somewhere to put it that I know I will find it again. I’ll put it in my October pocket. For some reason card shopping is one of the most challenging things to shop for with my kids. They have no patience for me to pick out the perfect card and if they aren’t restrained in a shopping cart they love to run down the card isle and pull them out and destroy any card organization the store has in place.

I use binders when we go home to the east coast to visit family. I print out the phone numbers to our friends and family out east as well as favorite restaurants that we want to visit and phone numbers of our neighbors in case we would need to check up on something back home. I include maps, activities for kids and the hours of the various establishments we hope to visit and I keep our receipts in one of the clear protector sheets with a tally sheet so we can stay within our vacation budget.

I know there are many more ways to use a simple binder with clear protector sheets to organize various things. I have several empty binders waiting to be filled.

Incredibly Useful Purchase for Paper Control

I do not know anyone who would not agree to this statement, “I hate paper clutter.” I grew up in a house where paper was a serious problem. 80% of our dinners were spent at a table with piles of paper at the opposite end (sorry mom). As a teenager, if my parents went away for a day or so I would get the clean bug and gather up all the papers sitting in various piles around the house and put them in a plastic sack. I was so proud of how clean the house was when they returned but now I realize how much work that meant for my mom because then she had to sort out the one gigantic pile into her previous piles before my clean bug destroyed her mountains.


My mother wants me to add that her house USED to be like that BEFORE she was diagnosed with ADD and that now her house has no paper clutter or piles of paper anywhere. I must admit, I haven't seen any paper messes in her home for years.

Four years ago I purchased a wall mounted magazine rack from this company . This purchase works miracles in our home and effectively eliminates the paper problem. It is opposite my basement door so it is mostly tucked away and it is within close proximity to my trash can. So every day I take the mail to the kitchen counter, throw away 90% of it (recycle bin of course, ah hem) and then file it in the correct pocket of my magazine rack. My friend Jodi (fellow paper hater) was visiting one day and remarked at how I disposed of my mail when it arrived in about 60 seconds. It has become so routine and takes up so little time and effort that I don't even think about it. I have 7 pockets on my magazine rack to distribute my mail:

(1) “to be filed” (those go to the basement once a month where my filing cabinet is)
(2) Bills (I pay those on pay day twice a month and then they get put in “to be filed”
(3) Daddy (he never looks at his mail but it’s there and it is no longer my problem)
(4) Uncle Mike (I was shipping my brother-in-laws mail to him in Iraq but for now it’s a free pocket)
(5) Grocery Fliers (I write the expiration date at the top left for each flier so I can clearly see when they are to be tossed)
(6) Coupons
(7) Magazines/catalogs (most just get thrown out around here)




When I have all three kids in grade school I would eventually like more pockets so I can assign a pocket per family member and have additional pockets for coupons, grocery fliers, etc. My oldest is in 1st grade so I’ll hold off on upgrading my magazine rack but I definitely will get one with more pockets in a couple years.

If paper clutter is getting the best of your home I urge you to take a peek at that website, it has a lot to offer and a lot more than what I have seen at other stores. There are wall mounted magazine racks with various numbers and configurations of pockets and made out of various materials. Mine is wood and I will warn you that you can lose small pieces of paper at the bottom of some pockets. I have wasted a bit of time using kitchen utensils to retrieve a water bill a couple times. The wall-mounted racks free up counter and desk space. Heck I like anything that can be mounted to the wall. It opens up space on horizontal surfaces. Resting my eyes on clean and clear clutter-free space makes me happy.