challenge: cookbook cabinet

It's actually quite amazing how out of hand this tiny little cabinet is. To look at this photo, one might wonder how this project could possibly require a week for completion- it looks like it might just need to be straightened up and a few things put away elsewhere- but it is much, much worse than that.

There are years and years worth of loose recipes- printed out from the internet, clipped from magazines, jotted down on scraps of paper, etc.- crammed into this cabinet in between the useful cookbooks. I have been "meaning" to go through it all and organize it for some time now, and it just keep getting put off until later. But it would be SO nice to be able to access my recipes easily when I wanted them, instead of rifling through this mess every week. I cook dinner from scratch 6 nights a week on average, in addition to a lot of baking. I NEED these to be in order to make my daily life run more smoothly! Also in this cabinet are magazine clippings for craft and activity ideas from Family Fun magazine and elsewhere. Instead of keeping the entire magazine I cut out what I am interested in and recycle the rest. None of them will ever get done though, with the current storage system in place.

The plan here is to go through and:

• discard recipes that I KNOW I will never cook for one reason or another
• organize loose recipes into a binder by category (beef, chicken, fish, desserts, etc.)
• organize craft/activity ideas into a separate binder
  
• of course, clean out the cabinet so things are neat and organized.

Update to come on Sunday! :)