DH and I have the paper organization divided. I keep the things like manuals, kid's papers, health insurance, etc. in small hanging folder baskets on top of a bookshelf. DH keeps track of monthly bills and investments, etc. He has a cubbie hole system on top of one of his desks and items are divided up into those cubbies. That way he can easily find a current bill, the stack of donation places when we review in December, etc. We each have home office spaces in this house, but in our previous house I just kept things on the top of the cabinet in the formal dining room. It wasn't pretty, but it was easy to use. We keep no paper in the kitchen. Paper and kitchen counters just don't mix for us. DH use to open the mail and then restack it right next to the stove. Harping on him didn't change that, so I gave him a couple of warnings that anything paper piled on my counters would be trashed. I told him that I didn't keep my pots and pans stacked on his desk, so using the food prep space for paperwork was making my life difficult. After having me throw away all of the bills and everything else in the pile, he finally decided he could make the effort to walk a few steps and put it elsewhere. We are not really filers. More specifically, organized pilers. Our files are things which we rarely need. My piles hang, his piles are cubbies. Works for us right now. Gloria

DD50: That sounds ideal, but we don't have a Home Goods store in the small ocean side town that I live in. Unfortunately we have already lost 4 businesses in this small town, and a furniture store bearing a sign, asking for a bail-out, believe it or not! We DO have an antique store that is closing and right now it is 40% off. The woman wants out, and I did find two pieces of furniture that would work for my situation, but her prices are still too high. I will check again with her in a week to see if I can get her to drop lower. I have tried Freecycle and Craigslist and am active with both, and the file cabinet is a bit rusty that I don't think anyone would want it. Lena: You are most certainly correct. My words exactly!! We are headed for Depression. Closet space is ample, 'busy' but not crowded, but not an option for the file cabinet as I already have a small chest in there holding extra linens, one box of photo albums, etc.

Hi twit (love that name!)...... I actually have the PB black file cabinets with a granite top that I rescued from a friend. The cabinets seem to be very well made, look beautiful and have held up for the past year that I have owned them. I don't know what the top is like because, as I said, I used a granite top on mine, but I would imagine that if the file cabinets are well made, the top might be also!!! Good luck!

All good ideas. I've seen desk trays that slope upwards. Wonder if there is one that has graduated trays (wider on bottom, and so on). I'm leaning towards something that I can just lift out in one piece to find stuff on lower shelves, the top shelf holding stuff that are used often. A handle (like a tool or hobby box) would make it easy to lift it out. Now all I need to do is find it! As I said, I have this new lateral file cabinet that will fulfill all my filing needs. I've loaded all my files from 3 different file cabinets into the new cabinet and the plan is to purge and organize the contents. I know there is a lot of junk that can be tossed. Well, in this "dump" of all files from different locations I have lost an important file. I've looked everywhere (at least 3 times!) and just can't find it. This is one of the primary reasons to organize and de-clutter. So that we can find things easily and not spend hours trying to locate things. I'm at wits end and I'm beginning to suspect that it's just not here. Why just that file? Or, are there others that I don't know yet are missing? My plan for today is to pull all the files and do the purge and organize and label my files. It's just going to get done sooner than later. After that, I think I'll do a grid search of the whole house. Any ideas? Any psychics out there? Update: I found it! That's a couple of hours I'll never get back. BTW, it was a thin folder in a green hanging file. The tab with the label was not high enough to be seen from the hanging file. More reason to get those files organized with those tab thingees on the hanging files!