Your Own Homestead Binder

Remember the homestead binder I mentioned yesterday?  It's a great tool in a road to simplicity and you don't have to have a house on a hundred acres for it to work!  You can also call it whatever you want to.  We live on a large quarter acre block in the country, and because of how we utilise our block, I like to think of our house as a little homestead.  After all, it's all just a matter of how you look at things.

So gather up your supplies........ A 2 ring binder (cover it to reflect something you enjoy), some divider sheets, paper and a pen.......oh, and if you have those plastic dividers like I do, a pair of long nose tweezers sure helps to get the paper tags into them......

Keep it simple........ 7 dividers each marked pillar 1 to 7.  I printed out a photo or picture onto a sheet as a header page for each pillar, and it also gives me a mini "chapter" reference guide for what I can expect to find in each pillar........   Like this.....

And this.......

You can find a basic list of what is under each pillar on the section of this blog that refers to them.  Now sometimes you already have a kind of a folder started that is a bit of this and a bit of that, and you might wonder how in the world you can get those into pillar headings.......... Soooooo, keep it simple, write out your headings one under the other on some scrap paper, then pop an arrow beside those headings with what they might refer to, and then you will suddenly discover they fit under one of the pillars......... Something like this.......

Now, I really like to have a section that is just devoted to the kitchen..... It covers menu planning, which tells me the types of foods I can grow, and of course that leads to preserving etc etc...... But in reality, that all comes down to organisation ......hmmmmmm, so, Pillar 3!   See how it works.

I do however keep the plastic pages that hold the various business cards right at the front of the binder for easy access.   So there you have it,  gradually add things into your binder under each of the headings and enjoy having it all together in one place that is easy to access and easy to store.

Hugs, Sharm