A Tour Through My Home Journal

Do you keep a Home Journal? This was a concept I came across through one of my favourite bloggers - Dawn from By Sun and Candlelight.

It's funny you know, for years I kind of had all my bits and pieces for running a home and keeping on top of all the aspects of family life in various places. It would seem the logical thing to do is to put it all into one neat and pretty binder. Well it seems that that particular 'logical' thought was not to pop into my head naturally, but it certainly sparked something when I saw Dawn's Home Journal.

A Home Journal is basically a single place where you put all the bits and pieces that make up the running of your home. If you come on a brief tour through my Home Journal, I think you will get the idea.

Opening the cover...

On the left {not pictured} is a list of emergency contact numbers, our address and our personal contact numbers. This is here not only for me but for my children. They can simply open up the Home Journal and dial any emergency number should DH or I not be able to.

If you flip over the pretty front page I have dividers for Jan - Dec. Behind each month is an At-A-Glance calendar. I usually pull out last years 'Season Keeping' pages and pop them behind the appropriate month for future reference. I put each months meal plan begin the appropriate month, as well as any new recipes that are on that plan.

I have some pretty paper in front of these dividers onto which I use to jot down thoughts that enter my head that will need some thinking through later. For example, while reading a Little House book one year, I noted down that I wanted to make snow candy as Laura did with my girls later on in the year when snow lay on the ground. That sort of thing.

Next...

Meals and Recipes - behind this divider I have a printed chart of what fruit and veg is in season for each month. I also have a few monthly meal planning sheets stored here before they go behind the monthly dividers as well as shopping list blanks. If I find any recipes in magazines or on the net that look interesting I will put them here for future use.

The next divider is...

Financial. Here I keep a copy of the current months budget, and and banking sheet onto which I will keep a running tab of money spent out of the disposable we have each month. Once a week I will go online and check our bank balance and reconcile. Any slips for purchases that may require returning etc is kept here too.

After financial homes Homemaking. Behind this tab at the moment I have:

- Directions to our home
- Cleaning Schedules
- Clothing lists for everyone
-recipes for home-made cleaners
-gardening seasonal planting guide
-books loaned out page - to keep track of what I have lent out to whom and when.
-Pets micro-chipping forms and contacts and a veterinary price list
-Pets boarding kennel info
-Brochure from our local library of services, charges and concessions
- Contact Brochures of some of our suppliers
- List of favourite websites, user names and passwords.

The next tab is labelled, 'Seasonal Planning'. Behind this tab I have:

- Some great seasonal planning articles that have stuck out for me and I want to read again
- Past years seasonal plans
- magazine and Internet clippings that I will want to use in future.
- Pretty paper to make notes
- Brochures or printouts of seasonal activities to be moved behind monthly tabs when I plan for that particular month. For example, I have a printout of the booking details for this years panto and a print out of our nearest PYO (pick-your-own) farm

After this comes 'Faith'.

In this section I currently have:

- A 31 Days To Praying For Your Homeschool printout
- A calendar month of 'Praying For Your Children' page
- A liturgical Year Calendar
- Ideas as I come across them for marking important events in the Christian Calendar.
- List of Christian Books I want to read and music CD's I want to purchase

The next tab is 'Contacts'

Here I have a list of suppliers {council, water, gas, bank etc}, our account numbers for each one, and their contact numbers. This makes it so much easier when I need to contact one of them. All our info and their is in one place.

I also have a list of Important renewal dates for the year. Things like our car insurance, Road Tax and MOT etc...

Behind this page is a contacts page which has the telephone numbers of people like my hairdresser, milkman, optician etc. as well as the contact details for our children's extra-curricular classes and tutors.

After 'contacts' comes 'Family'.

In this section we have:

- The girls immunisation records
- Doctors reports
- Any communication from doctors, hospitals etc
- All medical info on family members
- pre-school reports for the girls
-certificates of any class or event that the girls have achieved.
-Baptism certificates for all of us

Next is 'Personal'.

Behind this tab I have:

-the Registration certificates for both our cars
- Copies of our Motor Insurance Schedules
- A copy of our lease
- A withdrawal form from the deposit holding company for our rented house which I will need should we vacate our home.
- Magazine subscription details
- Our T.V licence

Next up is 'Family Jaunts'.

Here I have:

-Brochures of places to visit
- List/Schedule of county fairs, National Trust and Woodland Trust activities for the year
- Swimming Pool Schedule

and lastly we have 'Homeschool'.

Behind this tab I have:

-Newsletters from the TEACH academy (our homeschool curriculum provider)
- Copy of the TEACH catalogue
- Our TEACH membership details
- Their contact details
- My certificate for completing my training with them.
- Details of any extra classes we might be interested in
- Details of my local corporate embroidery company as I have designed our own personal 'homeschool sweater' for this year.
- and of course my design for our homeschool sweaters :o)

So there we have it. I hope that by walking through  my Home Journal with me you get an idea of what a useful tool it can be to keeping your home in order.

There are plenty of free Home Journal printable's out there that you can use when putting your own binder together, but I like 'pretty and coordinated'. I just know it would drive me mad to have different designs all over the place. So last year I invested in a lifetime membership of 'MomsToolbelt' for $24.95. 

This is not something that I have regretted doing for even a second! All the cover pages that you see in the photographs are from Mom's Toolbelt and there is so SO much more. There is a form, page, printout for just about every area of your life that you can think of and for all those areas that don't even cross your mind!

She has Christmas planners, Medical Journals, Homeschool Planners, Calendars that are updated annually, Home Journal's, Chore Charts, Recipe Binders, etc. Each and every page is available in any of the 5 themes she has, so you can customise your planner to your taste. 

If you visit MomsToolbelt, you can download free Household Planner Sample!

For some free planner pages, Donna Young would be my first stop. 'How to make your own Home Management Binder' on the blog 'Living Life Brightly' is a post full of free links used by the author to create her own binder. Of course 'google' is a great way to find hundreds of freebies. 

Right - I must be going now - this post has turned out to be rather longer than I thought!

Have a lovely day all :o)