The Spencer household has gone paperless. (see above post)
Behold....our desk:
(hey, there's my blog! And....the back end of an elephant)
This has been no easy feat, but we’ve done it. It’s taken a while. On both my husband and my parts. See, my husband used to have his own law firm. Which involved LOADS of paper. Paper everywhere. Paper in the office. Paper in filing cabinets in the garage. Everywhere.
Earlier this year, he shut down his firm because he got another job outside of the home. We had to do something with all of his paper. So he borrowed a high speed scanner, and started scanning away. Everything. All of the files (which he is required to keep for a certain period of time). It took a couple of months, even with the superfast scanner because there were so many files.
Then, I went through all of our personal files and scanned those. Tax info. Health Insurance info. Retirement info. You name it. Nothing was safe.
If it was something that we did not need a paper copy of, I shredded the paper copy.
We have a folder labeled ‘important’ with our marriage license, birth certificates, etc. Obviously, we will keep these paper copies, but I wanted to scan the originals as well, just in case.
We got everything down to one small filing cabinet from Ikea.
And it's maybe just half full.
However, I was not satisfied. After assessing what was left in the cabinet, I wanted to do more. What was taking up the bulk of the cabinet?
Manuals.
Appliance manuals, electronics manuals, household manuals, etc. Manuals for items we no longer owned, you name it, it was there.
The first thing I did was sort through them and get rid of any for products we no longer owned.
Then, Google became my best friend. I did a Google search for each and every product manual that we had. I found most of them on this website:
Once you type in the make and model of what you’re looking for, if they have it you can view it as a PDF and save it directly to your computer. If they don’t have it, they direct you to the company website so you can search for it there.
I was able to get rid of most of the bulky manuals and the plastic they came in. The ones I couldn’t find online, I manually scanned (no pun intended). I then created a folder for each room in the house and saved the appropriate manuals to each folder.
I was left with one small plastic envelope of manuals. Happiness!
(My label maker and washi tape were my best friends during this project)
We’ve even gone paperless with most of our spiritual literature.
We currently keep just the current year of magazines on hand. The back issues can be found online if we need them. I went through our books and definitely kept a couple of shelves full, but the magazines were the main items taking up space.
I know some people may be hesitant to do this. I was at first, but it didn’t take me long to realize how nice it was not to have all of that paper everywhere being a dust collector and fire hazard. We have a reliable computer, plus a backup drive within that computer. And most of the manuals can be found online (along with the magazines), even if both of our systems fail. And I don’t think we’ve EVER referred to the manual itself if we have an issue. If we’re troubleshooting with one of our electronics or appliances, we Google. As do most people.
So far, I am loving this. I hate clutter, especially paper clutter. We try to deal with mail each day as we get it and not let it pile up. After I pay the bills, I scan the statement and save it to it’s folder on the computer. Then it gets shredded. No paper pile-up!
If you don’t have access to a scanner, no worries. If you have a smartphone or an iPad or other tablet of some sort, there are tons of apps out there that allow you to take a picture of the item and then email it to yourself as a PDF file. I downloaded Turbo Scan ($1.99) for my iPhone, and tested a few items out. They came out great as PDFs! It really couldn’t be easier. I think I will use Turbo Scan the most for single sheets of paper, like the monthly bills we get, although the app does have the ability to save multiple pages in one document.
The only ‘going paperless’ project I have yet to tackle is my recipes. I need to find an app out there to store my ‘loose’ recipes – ones ripped from magazine pages, copied down, etc. I’d like to get rid of my unsightly binder that holds my magazine clippings, my random recipes printed off from websites, etc.
I mostly use allrecipes.com on my iPad while I’m cooking. I keep it propped up on my cookbook holder, ha ha. The modern cookbook!
This definitely was time-consuming. But the hard part is done. Now it will just be ‘maintenance’ and scanning thing (with the Turbo Scan app) as they come in. Easy-peasy!
