when your filing cabinet lives in the laundry...

Yep. Our filing cabinet is in the laundry. Sometimes the decision about where to place certain items of furniture is taken out of your hands when there is not a lot of available space. Our filing cabinet happened to fit pretty well in the laundry. The bottom two drawers contain files. The top drawer contains laundry powder, napisan, wool wash, a lint brush, enjo floor fibres, a delicates bag...
you get the idea.

The filing part of our filing cabinet is quite orderly. There are labelled tabs on suspended files - and some even have labelled sub categories within them! Great! It seems I am on top of things here.
Except for two things...
a) the named tabs I set up were relevant three years ago - so any extra categories that have cropped up are either merged with other (almost) related things, or just shoved into unmarked files at the back.
b) there are numerous important documents that are yet to make it into the filing cabinet.

The documents that fall into the second category could be in any of ten other places around the house. Yes you read that right... in total, we have ELEVEN different places around the house where we 'file' things! I shocked even myself when I counted them all. Lets explore this further. I'll take you through it in list form...

The places where we 'file' our important documents:

1. the filing cabinet
2. a green expandable file - this sits near the filing cabinet, but in the five and a half years
   we have been married I have not managed to merge or purge these documents
3. the floor beneath the filing cabinet
4. the dining room table
5. near my computer - mostly bills that I have already paid online
6. side of the fridge - immunisation information, doctor referrals, take away menus, childrens' artworks and more
7. kitchen bench
8. corner shelf in the kitchen - I found a few sneaky letters and prescriptions behind the
   tissue box
9. bookshelf in hallway - things are squeezed in between books that should be filed away
10. bookshelf in lounge room - more things just shoved there, most likely moved from the dining table in order to clear space for dinner
11. sideboard near the front door - as well as unopened credit card statements, there are gift certificates, keys, a promo sized sorbelene cream, cuff bracelet, broken earrings, loose change, pencils, a piece off a scooter, ribbons, glue stick, goggles, a bendy man, a farmer made at playtime and a drum stick holder engraved with the words "Happy 21st Lincoln" (no one in our family plays the drums or has the name Lincoln) and I'm too lazy to keep going. There are too many things here.

As you can see, I have a fair bit of work ahead of me. So, first, I have planned to gather all of the loose documents into one place in order to sort through them. I will make piles: to chuck, to file in filing cabinet, to keep elsewhere (if there is anything sentimental). I will also update my file names and add more where needed. Also, I am going to purchase a 5-tab file from kikki.K to organise the incoming snail mail as soon as it comes through the door (thanks for the tip, Ronnie!). I will tell you more about this later.

Question: How many filing places do you have?