This post is a follow up to The Mail Organization Project: Stage 1 – Recognizing the Problem.
It took a bit longer than I had hoped, but I’ve finally put into place a new mail organization system in our home. I couldn’t be more excited to tame the beast that is our daily bounty of postal goodness.
The basis for our system is Pottery Barn’s popular Daily System. My biggest challenge was a spatial constraint – I wanted to use a bit of space in my kitchen that afforded just 14 inches of horizontal wall space. This ruled out many other solutions – fortunately, the Daily System components I needed (the Letter Bin and Office Organizer) are a svelte 12 inches wide! We may only be in our house for 6 more months or so, so it was important to me that we could reuse these in our future home, potentially for a different purpose. I like that the system has other components you can add on, and that it coordinates perfectly with my Bedford Corner Desk. OK – enough about Pottery Barn…
Here is what our new mail organization system looks like, and a bit on how it will work. Click on the images to enlarge, or view as a slide show.
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- I am loving the Office Organizer even more than I thought I would! Outbound mail and stamps go in the lower right pocket, and our return address stamp has found a nice home on the top shelf.
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- View from the kitchen to the main hall and dining room.
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- Another view of the system. I like how my husband also should now never need to look for missing keys!
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- There are two slots in the Letter Bin. The top one contains mail pieces that require someone else’s attention, the bottom is primarily for bills that need to be paid, but also for forms, surveys, etc. that need to be returned or responded to (definite action required).
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- View to front of the house. Just steps away from our front door, where all of the mail comes in. I like how the Daily System does not call too much attention to itself in our home.
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- View from the kitchen. I installed it next to our refrigerator.
You may notice that there is no place for lots of other key types of mail, such as:
- Catalogs – 99% of them are immediately put into our recycling bin
- Credit card solicitations and the like – to be collected in a grocery bag (next to the recycling bin) and shredded weekly
- Packages – we generally unpack and break down the boxes immediately for our many online shopping deliveries…boxes go to the recycling bin
We will need to process and sort our mail from the wall pockets on a weekly basis, in order to make this work. Otherwise, we will quickly run out of space and the system will fail. Based on the investment of money and time in purchasing and hanging the Daily System, and my strong desire to keep our kitchen island clutter-free, I am committed to making it work.
When you combine objects with processes, you never really know how well the objects will serve the process (and vice versa) until you’ve lived with them for a while. I’ll provide an update after we’ve had ample time to “catch up” on our mail stash, and give our new mail organization system a chance to work. Wish me luck!
