Here is another area in your home that needs to be gone through on a regular basis to avoid the clutter of unnecessary paperwork that has become irrelevant over time.
Firstly all warranties and manuals should be stored together in a safe place where they can be easily located should a situation arise where it becomes necessary to refer to them. We keep ours in a hanging file box in the bottom of our linen closet with other documents such as lease/phone contracts, vehicle registration info etc.
Over time these documents become redundant, warranty periods expire and you no longer own items that you are still holding manuals for. Therefore the paperwork becomes clutter taking up valuable space.
I suggest visiting these files once a year to weed out the documents that are no longer relevant and dispose of them. I am considering scanning the manuals so I can dispose of them altogether but that is a project for another day.
I went through my file today and found a small batch that have become unnecessary because of the culling process we are going through with our 365lessthings project. I will not be photographing these and adding them to the list of 365 because I have so many other things to document at the moment that I just can’t be bothered with this one little thing but I am glad it is one more area of my home that is uncluttered.
ITEM 119 OF 365 LESS THINGS
Todays’s item is one of those things that in my opinion is just made wrong. It feels too small and compacted making it uncomforatable to use so in the garbage is goes.
Hi!
First, I’ve been following your blog only for a few weeks now, but am quite enjoying it. I need all the inspiration I can get to de-clutter. Thanks!
Second – I threw out almost all of my user’s manuals a few months ago. It started when I was looking for one manual in particular. After getting frustrated looking through the file drawer I keep them in for 20 minutes (to no avail), I decided to go online. To my delight, I found the manual on the manufacturer’s web site within about a minute.
That inspired me to see if I could find others online which is when I stumbled upon a brilliant (free) website: http://www.manualsonline.com/ You have to endure a few ads, but I was able to find most all of the products I own. I took a few hours to go through each of my manuals to see which were there, but the huge stack that were went right into the recycle bin!
Hi Jen,
Thanks for that tip. I have done that once before when I was trying to find a manual for something I was selling on eBay and it was very helpful.
Most of the manuals I have are assembly manuals for Ikea furniture, because we move every so often and that type of funtiure survives better if you disassemble it I keep the instructions so we won’t have any problems putting them back together. I did check out the ikea web site to see if they stored the manuals but they wanted too many personal details from me in order to make a request and I wasn’t comfortable with that. I will probably scan them and store them on the computer sometime soon.
I will make mention of your helpful tip on my blog though, thanks again.
I spent the afternoon tossing old manuals and finding the rest online. Now I have a Google Docs folder with PDFs of everything I still own. I found most of them on the manufacturers web sites.
Hi Steph,
nice to hear from you. This appears to be a popular solution to this problem and isn’t it amazing how pleased we get with ourselves for uncluttering just one little area. I feel inspired to go and take care of scanning my IKEA docs right now even though I have had a busy day already and have a visitor arriving this afternoon….
Just went on-line and found this site http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_US/customer_service/assembly_instructions.html#13 which has the assembly instruction for IKEA furniture. A couple of the pieces I own were not there though but most of them were.