Updated Sep. 22, 2019.  Originally published Apr. 2, 2013.

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With the Products, or All Together?

When it comes to instruction manuals and warranties, there are two major schools of thought.

1. Keep manuals with the products they go with.  (That is, keep the television manual with the television, the refrigerator manual with the refrigerator, etc.)
2. Keep manuals all together in a central location.

Neither option is wrong, as long as it works for you.  In our house, if we tried to keep the manuals with the products they accompany, I’m pretty confident they’d get lost or destroyed in a hurry!  So we keep them all together.  (Kitchen manuals are something of an exception.  All the kitchen manuals go together, but not with the rest of manuals – they have a centralized location in the kitchen.)

I like to keep warranties and receipts in the manuals.  Just staple them right in, and you won’t lose them.  (The only reason I can think of that you would want to not do this, is if you keep the manuals with the products but keep the warranties/receipts in a centralized location.)

If You Keep Them with the Products

If you keep the manuals with the products, you will probably want to tape them to the backs/undersides of the products, or something similar, to ensure that they don’t get separated.  (Not essential, of course; it’s up to you.  This probably depends in part on how likely young children in your house are to carry them off. 🙂 )

If You Keep Them All Together

If you’re going to keep them all together, you need a method to the madness.  My favorite way to keep these is in a large 3-ring binder.  (I love 3-ring binders!)  Book-style manuals can be attached with magazine holders if you like.  Anything small enough to fit can go in a page protector.  I like to add labels to the top-right of each page protector specifying what’s in them, and then alphabetize the “pages,” based on the “generic” name of the item.  For instance, I would put “telephones” under “T.”  (I wouldn’t use a brand name to alphabetize unless that’s what we usually call the item.  Otherwise, we might have trouble finding what we’re looking for, if we can’t remember the brand name offhand.)

Unfortunately, our stack of manuals outgrew even the very large binder we were using, and we had to switch to a file box – another good option.  (This doesn’t work as well for me because it’s harder for me to flip through and find what I want.  But that’s a personality/processing style thing, I think.)  Accordion files are another option.  If you’re not concerned about having difficulty keeping them in order, you could even use a magazine file (the kind that stands on a shelf).

STEP 1: Choose where/how to store your warranties and instruction manuals.

STEP 2: If they aren’t already together (and you plan for them to be), gather your manuals all into one place and store them in whatever manner you chose.

If you’re just stumbling across this, please click here for the other posts in the series.