How To Organize Warranties, Manuals and Household Documents

this post contains affiliate links

Do you have a central location where you store your household documents? I’m talking about all the paperwork that comes with the thing you actually wanted but isn’t really necessary for daily use of the blender, vacuum, router or whatever else you ordered from Amazon.

If your answer to this is “no”, then all of those papers and manuals become CLUTTER! They sit in a pile on your desk, in a closet or on the spare bedroom dresser.

Here are four quick steps you can take to create an organization system for all those manuals and papers you need in an emergency.

1. Determine What Documents You Really Need to Organize

Gather all the manuals, warranties and paperwork you want to keep. Throw away or shred things that you don’t need – including manuals for things you no longer own. You might want to organize things like:

• Electronic manuals and warranties
• Appliance manuals, warranties and service history
• Home insurance documents
• Tax documents

2. Choose a System That Works for You

Decide how you will organize the documents. Choose the system that makes sense to you – organize your paperwork in a way that will make it easy to find what you need in an emergency. You may want to organize things according to the rooms in your home, by the year they were purchased, or even just alphabetically!

Choose an organization system to house the documents. Here are a few suggestions:

• One binder for every room in the house – use poly envelopes to easily store booklet-style papers
• A file box with hanging file folders for each category – this one is already set up and would be very easy to maintain!
• A hanging file drawer or locked cabinet – if you have room in your home office, this is a great option.

Look under the table in the picture below. Here’s the one I use – it’s a pretty file box from Target that doubles as decor! I bought it several years ago and cannot find it online, sorry!

3. Organize and Label

Get those papers into your system, and clearly label each section! Make sure you leave room to grow, so that adding new paperwork won’t be a frustrating session of “let’s see how many papers we can cram in here.” 🙂

4. Maintain The System

The success of any organization system depends on your willingness to maintain it. Keep the folders neat and up to date. Take a minute to purge old documents when you add new ones to the system.

Read More —> The Secret To An Organized Life