Love Your Home: Creating a Home Management Binder

What will happen if we go on vacation, get sick, or must help someone far away? What happens to all the household duties...

Becky Shaible
February 3rd, 2022
5 min read

What will happen if we go on vacation, get sick, or must help someone far away? What happens to all the household duties and responsibilities?

One way that you can keep all that helpful and viable information in a safe spot for anyone to help you out with your home is by keeping a Home Management Binder. Not only is this great for when others are helping you around the house, but it’s also an amazing stress reliever to help organize all the things that you must get done throughout the day, week, month, or even year! Below find a couple of good steps to help show your home some love and help you create the best home management binder for your house.

Step 1

When you want to create a home management binder you have to put into perspective of who will be utilizing this binder? Will it be for you and whoever helps when you are away? Is it to help with kids’ activities and chores? Or could it just be an entire user manual for everything in your home? Either way you must make it somewhat user friendly for whomever that may be. Once you have that established then you know how much space you need and an idea of where to start planning out your home management binder.

Step 2

No matter what type of home binder you choose to make, you will always need supplies. Yes, this means grab your wallet and use this as an excuse to go stationary shopping because you will need ALL of it! Depending on how detailed you want this to be you are going to want to start off with some sort of 3-Ring Binder or a tickler file to hold all this information. Then you will probably need to get some dividers to help separate different areas of the home, topics, or even by person in the household. Then make sure to load up on different color pens, post-its, page flags, even some stickers if you want to get a little crafty with it and make it entertaining for the little ones.

Step 3

Once you have all your supplies ready to go it is time to get the documents sorted. Yes, this might be the worst part of it all, but someone must do the dirty work. Start with grabbing that stack of papers that have been piling up and put them in stacks of bills, activities, school, and any other topic you will be sectioning off in your home binder. Another helpful thing that you can place inside of your binder are manuals to any devices or toys that are in your house. We all realize we need them at the worst time so instead of throwing it away just stick it in the binder!

Step 4

Now it’s time to see what helpful tools there are we can add to our documents. One thing that you can use in any situation is a checklist. You can make a generic one and insert it in several of the areas in your binder so whenever there is a task to do, you can just flip right to that section and add it. Another helpful thing to have in your binder would be bills and due dates. That way if anything ever happens to you where you cannot be home, whoever is helping you out will know when and how to pay these bills. One other great tool to have in here is a calendar for the month or week. That way you know exactly what is going on for that month and the next 1-2 and plan to get the best outcome.

Step 5

The final step is putting everything together and making sure it is easy for you to maneuver through even in a speedy moment when you only have a second. After putting it together make sure to review it with any of the people you will be sharing it with and let them know where all of the important information is and how the binder works. Next is finding the perfect location in your home for the management binder which is a hard decision since its needed pretty much everywhere. A few questions to help you decide would be: Where does my family spend most of there time? What would be the most visible place for it (without it getting ruined of course)?

Some helpful hints for what NOT to do with your home management binder is not to put any personal information in it that could possibly be stolen and used against you like your social security number or card, private bank account information, or passwords and pins to important accounts. Whether the book stays in the home or goes with you everywhere it’s always good to take proper precautions with your information.