The Reason Why Keeping a Home Planner is a Good Idea

I have been keeping a house/home of my own for a little bit over 21 years.  In those years, I have learned a few things.  Some of them I wish I would have learned sooner as I know there is still some I need to learn.

For example, I still need to learn how to meal plan and not resent it every time I think about it.  I still need to figure out how to manage my pantry and make peace with cooking every.single.day.

On the other hand, I have learned there is so much tidbits of information we need to know to run a household.  Some of them are big enough that makes sense you would keep track of them, like paychecks or when bills need to be paid, but others are like post-it notes, random stuff in my head that I know I will need at some point, yet I have no where for it to go, like, what size shoes are my ever-growing kids wearing right now, when was the last time I took the car for an oil change, what was that book my friend kept mentioning that she would like and would make a great birthday present?  Who has a birthday this month?

I have found a system that works for me.  A central place of where to write down all this information so I don’t have to keep it in my head.  And that is a Home Base Planner.  Now I call it a planner because I use sections of it to schedule the house projects and keep the meal planning and so on, but it could be a Home Base binder, Home Base Notebook, etc.

I revisit it every December/January to make sure sections still work and to make changes as needed per our season in life. Here is a tour of my 2021 Home Base Planner. 

The first pages are: a year at a glance calendar and my annual date calendar for family and friends’ birthdays and anniversaries.  Then I have ten sections:

1.      Routines – my routines and the kids.  I break them from morning, afternoon and evening.

2.      Monthly/Weekly planning – this is where I plan monthly items/projects for the house and then break them into weekly to-dos.  I use this section when I am planning my week in my daily planner to remind me of those projects and make that commitment.

3.      Budget –   This is one of those skills, I wish I would have learned 21 years ago. But so glad I learned it.  I have a budget for:

a.      yearly

b.      monthly

c.      weekly

d.      daily tracking budget. 

4.      Cleaning – Monthly schedule for those cleaning items that are not weekly and now I am also adding the projects I am learning to schedule from the Martha Stewart Organizing book.

5.      Kitchen – I struggle with this one, but I also know what a difference it makes in our budget and trying to be healthier, so I keep trying to learn it.  I do:

a.       meal planning

b.      weekly grocery list

c.       pantry inventory

d.       list of favorite meals (this one changes as the kids grow and hubby gets tired of spaghetti).

6.      House Maintenance – I have forms for:

a.      A “dump brain” list of all the house projects, big or small, we want to take care of this year.

b.      a tracking form on when a project starts to keep the budget, the supplies, the ideas we have for it, etc.

c.      a tracking form for car maintenance, and appliances and furniture.

 7.      Contacts – I realized in the time of cell phones, I can’t quite memorize what other people’s phone numbers are anymore (except if you ask me my home phone number from 30 years ago, I’ll still remember that one).  I use the contact section for:

a.       our family phone numbers including extended family members

b.      each members’ doctors’ numbers, insurance with the policy # and our agents name and number. 

Really any number we would need a quickly look up in an emergency instead of trying to find the    paperwork where that number is.  I guess is my version of the old address book but only for specific numbers related to the run of the house and its members.

8.      Family – this is the section where I place all the tidbits that would be in my head or some post-it-note somewhere.  I have a list for all four of us with:

a.       clothes sizes,

b.      gift ideas,

c.      mediation, allergies, etc.

d.      the kids school schedule.  They both have different classes every other day, they are in different schools with different starting and ending times, it helps me to have that information on hand. 

e.      a form for each person where I document little wins.  Kid learned to do a hard math problem; I write it down.  Hubby created a great project at work; I write it down.  This is new this year.  We realized in 2020 that days were just passing us by and when we tried to look at what the year was like, beyond the big events, aka – pandemic, we had a hard time remembering the little wins.  Because beyond the big events and the hard 2020, there were some fun, exciting little wins and I want to document them more and celebrate them.

9.      Last section – Christmas.  I don’t use this one throughout the year, however, as the second half of the year begins, I start writing down:

a.       ideas for gifts

b.       Christmas cards design

c.       food we want to try, new events we might want to do, etc.

At the back of all the sections, I have a NOTEs section.  I use it to write down anything that might pop into my head for the house, but I am not sure yet where the information needs to go.  I’ll assign it (if needed) to its own section during my weekly planning time.

By having this home management planner as the central location to keep all the information that comes in and out of the house has helped me keep track of random things and information I need.  It also has given me a feeling of being organized.  The kids and hubby know this is where they need to go to if they ever needed information for the house.  I do not put passwords in it but I do have the basic information.

Now it wouldn’t be my kind of planner if I did not have stickers in them or washi tape or fun decorative dashboards.  It just brightens my day when I open it up and it looks so pretty.  Do you have a Home Base Planner?