Buried Alive!

Now that I have a better handle on my email inbox I have decided that it is time to try and get control of the avalanche of paper that has taken over most of our house.  Whether it is notices sent home from school, newsletters, updates, bills, important notices, or the dreaded "junk mail" we seem to be inundated with reams of paper all the time. The problem with that is we have to figure out what to do with all this paper.  And we are very bad at this in our house.  We have mountains of paper that just sits in our house waiting for us to go through it and figure out what to do with it.  And quite frankly, it is all too overwhelming to deal with right now.  Maybe sometime I will come up with an idea that will help me deal with the avalanche of old papers in my house but not now.

Instead, I decided to try and figure out a system to deal with any NEW paper that comes in the house from now on.  The new system is nothing revolutionary - just get mail sorting trays for each member of the family and sort it as soon as it comes into the house.  And make sure that junk mail goes right into the recycling bin.

In order to do this, I needed to get mail sorting trays.  So what kind should I get?  Where to get them?  Should everyone have the same one, or different ones for each person?  And wait a minute, these things are expensive and I don't have money to spare.  For a minute it looked like my organizing venture was doomed.

But then I thought -  these trays were just for our family and were meant to reduce the stress of clutter around us.  They did not have to be Martha Stewart worthy.  Just just had to work.  We could just make trays.  We must have something in all this clutter that would work.  And then I hit on the perfect thing.

For those of you who don't know me, my family and I foster kittens for a local animal shelter.  We love doing it and love helping the high risk kittens that come through our home.  Because we take the odd cases we have kittens in our house pretty much year round.  That means we have canned kitten food in our house all the time.  A lot of kitten food.  Cases (and cases) of  kitten food. 

We recycle the cardboard cases in a variety of ways.  They make good temporary litter boxes for kittens who need to be in a crate for a few days.  They also make a good tray for containing the mess of paint, glitter and other art supplies during kids craft projects.  And of course, they can go right into the cardboard recycling.  So when preparing yet another empty case to go into recycling it occurred to me that with a little work and some markers, these could be turned into mail trays.

So yesterday, I sat down with tape, markers, stickers, computer paper and my 7 year old niece and went to work.  The funny thing is that what started as a way to avoid going to the store and spending money on an organization system that might not work turned into a fun family project.  And in my humble opinion the end result is better than anything I can get in a store because it truly reflects the individuality of my family.   Here they are:

Front view

Side view

Will the system work to help control the incoming mail?  Only time will tell.  But if nothing else, we have fun.  And that makes it worth it to me.