Cluttered CorkBoard

I have been sorting, getting rid of, and organizing pretty much all over the house.

One of the things I have always put off however are all of the items that I have saved
over the years from our kids schoolwork, artwork, school programs, field trips, and so on
and of course all of our photographs.  (yikes)

Well I finally did it.
I have started tackling the photo's..  thousands and thousands of them.
Not kidding.    Yep, I am one of those moms. :0)

I have to laugh at how many pictures that I took and prints that
I made of some things.   Lol.   
I have come to the realization I do not need to keep every photo that I took
and had printed.
Of course back in the day you used film, then dropped it off to be developed
so everything you took a photo of was printed out, good or not, focused or not, etc.
Anyone remember those days? 
Picking up your pictures and seeing what you actually took photo's of and how
they turned out was kind of a your fingers crossed hoping all were good kind of
moment. 😉

I have been going through the years of photo's and putting them together by year and
event, and this is how I am keeping track of them.






Paper clips, and post it's.

It doesn't get much easier than that, and this will help tremendously when I am
ready to get them organized into my photo boxes.

You do not have to spend a lot of money on organizational items to be organized.
While some things are definitely fun to buy, look nice, and work well for organization,
more likely than not you can find an inexpensive option that can also work.

One example is I found these hard plastic clear organization photo boxes that
hold a lot of photo's inside them in separate cases and they do look nice,
but since I am unsure at this point if that is what I want and they are on the pricier
side in my opinion,  I have decided to use these photo boxes that I picked up at
Michaels. (at the time they were on sale for $2.00.)



This is what I have used since forever for our photo's, but from picking them up at
different times over the years, mine were mismatched.
Plus I have had them for  y-e-a-r-s  and some of them definitely have seen better days,
so I decided they could use an update and chose to pick up some new ones.

After several days of going through pictures on and off I am finally done organizing
them and have placed them in the boxes.





They are sorted by year as well as event (using the paper clips/post its)
and will make scrapbooking a lot easier when I finally
make the time to get back in to that.  (it has been a while)





I simply used a post it style tab to label the boxes temporarily by the years as I went along.
I will be adding prettier labels to them when I tackle organizing this bookshelf.

They look so much better and just knowing they are sorted and organized, well that is such
a good feeling because I have wanted to get this done for a while and just hadn't done it.

This project is still a work in progress however, and I am on to the next phase.
It is time to tackle the amount of stuff that I saved over the years while our kids were
in school.
All of the artwork, assignments that I chose to keep from each grade, stories they wrote,
awards they earned,  programs from school events,
and some of my favorite things.. cards and pictures they made me.

So I am looking for a nice storage solution option for those items as I go through them and
downsize a bit.



So the search is on..

How do you organize your photo's and momento's?
What works for you?

Blessings,
-TinaH