Suzy Homemaker

Here is my Home Management Binder. This will be our "master plan" for how things will be organized in our home. My friend, Anya, introduced me to the concept and I think it could work to keep us on track. So this is my groovy cover....you may of course choose a binder with a clear pouch cover so you can slip your own decorated page in, but I had this binder on hand for school.

My first section is calendars. I printed out monthly calendars starting last October so we could note appointments made far in advance and vacation and such. We have a white board single month calendar on the fridge, but I did this to have a place to keep the info for things not of THIS month. Obviously, you would make your calendars as suits your activities. I imagine someday I'll need weekly calendars for each child to note their activities. For now Reese's social engagements are essentially my social engagements, so monthly has been working quite well for us since October. I also have a single page listing everyone's birthdays.

My section 2 is Chores. Note the joyous attitude to greet us when we delve into our chores.

I created a page for each day except Friday and Saturday. Every other Friday is Payday and we'll do the basement for sure plus anything else we add on payday. The non-payday Friday is a piddle around day as will be EVERY single Saturday. So we decided what we wanted to do and then assigned it a day. Load and Empty dishwasher is on every day, as is clean counter tops.

My next section is meal planning. This area will have a pocket for coupons that I have not added yet. I'm also keeping a list of favorite recipes' ingredients. The name of the recipe followed by a list of non-staple ingredients. I will not be rigid about it. What we've been doing in 2008 is kind of deciding what we want to eat this pay period and then deciding on the day which thing it will be as opposed to rigidly saying "we will eat meal x on monday the 1st". I will also note any new recipes I really want to try so when we do our plan we won't forget to include it in our plan.

Our last section (for now) is home repairs and organization. This is where we'll keep our brainstorming lists for stuff we want to do with the house. We also have our priorities list, so when we get some money we remember what we wanted to do first. We'll keep names and phone numbers of recommended worker bees. We'll also keep estimates we get for big projects we'll need professionals for.

So...this is our organizational plan, obviously your needs may be different and you would plan your sections accordingly. You probably want photos of your own kids or pets or whatever to depict each section. Just be prepared to accept they won't be as cute as our Reesie photos!!