Coupons galore! Day (lost track) of 60/300!

Today was the first day in a while that I felt well enough to do much of anything. Unfortunately, Charlie Bear didn't get the memo that we were supposed to be feeling better. He's been sick for nearly 2 weeks now, running a fever off and on. I swear it's due to those blasted shots. I wish I could convince Chris to fore go them. However, thats a post for another day :)

A while ago I asked Chris to rearrange furniture for me. He hates doing this, but he does it without too much complaint. I am a truly lucky gal!

I could have sworn I posted a picture of my desk area, but I can't find it. So this is what my desk area looked like, and what people saw when first entering my home:

This is a major work in progress. It was all neat and organized but the kids kept messing with everything and it became a disaster area. The blinds are all broken thanks to 4 kids and a dog, and will be taken down as soon as we buy some curtains. The desk is going to get a paint job - the wood will become black colored and the white grout with also be colored black. The silver filing cabinet will be spray painted white and green to match the other set of white and green drawers. The more I thought on it, though, the more I hated this being in the living room. So now our living room looks like this:

So much more welcoming, and homey! The blue recliner rocker makes for a great little reading area. A few more items await this room before it's finished. There are going to be baskets on the Entertainment Center, curtains are going to be hung (and blinds taken down), some writing is going on the wall, ect. I think it will look fantastic when it's done!

This means that my desk had to go somewhere, and since our house isn't very large there was only one place for it to go. My room. Ugh, I hate having non-bedroom stuff in there but with 4 kids it's the only place that things can go if you don't want it messed with. It has a lot of work that needs to be done, as I've been to sick to do anything. It currently looks like this

See how back logged I am with my coupons? I'm trying to organize my inserts and needed floor space to do it. However, I haven't finished and it looks ridiculous.

This weekend my goal is to get my room back in shape. I won't be able to paint the desk just yet, but it will be soon! I also plan to hang shelves and a homemade sign of some sort. Still trying to think of just what I want it to say. I was thinking, "A Day in the Life of a Freg" but we'll see.

I've been using the coupon binder method for my coupons, and I love it.

Basically I have picture inserts that are labeled alphabetically and color coded. Colors are for food, and white is for toiletries and non-food items. I love this system, it is very easy to find exactly the coupon I'm looking for. HOWEVER, and it's a BIG however, it is very time consuming to keep up with. It can easily take a few hours a week just to keep it up. So each week I fell behind and behind until I was left with the mess you just witnessed. So now I'm doing a combined method. I still use my lovely binder for loose coupons, printables, ect. But now I use the insert method for most of it.

My files are labeled with the three major coupon inserts and then there is the Misc for the various other inserts I get. Then I take each weekly inserts, staple the like pages together (I buy 2-5 papers a week), and file them in a file folder with that weeks date on it. This way when they all expire I can just tack another sticker with a new date over the last one. Then the file folders are filed in order of date. Since I use "The Grocery Game" it tells me which insert the coupon I need is in and it takes just a moment to find it. I have a mini-coupon binder I take with me into stores that has a place for each store, their coupons, the ones I end up not using, ECB's, ect. Once I am finally done organizing it I will cut my coupon clipping and organizing time from a few hours to a few minutes.

And finally... I have inspired Chris to clean and organize too. I threatened to do his office space for him and so this weekend he began on it.

It looks awful, but I assure you this is much better than it was. This is the one room of the house I refuse to clean at all and so it is very much a scary scary mess. Hopefully this is finished this weekend too!