This
week I am assembling a very inexpensive planner to use in a series of
budget friendly plan with me's.
I
love to watch PWM videos and I love stickers but I know how expensive
this hobby of decorating our planners can become. From the initial
cost of the planner to all those beautiful sticker sets, the costs
can get really high really fast.
So
I have an option for the do-it yourself kind of planner. I am going
to delve into the sites that offer free alternatives for us. We are
starting out with an inexpensive 3 ring mini notebook from Target and
filling it with free down-loadable pages. Then in future weeks in
this series I will show you how to decorate it with free
down-loadable stickers and stuff from the craft store.
To
start we need a “house” for our planner. In the video I show you
just 2 of the many options available. I love the mini 3-ring binders
because they are inexpensive and fairly easy to find. I got mine at
Target but I know that other stores including the office supply
stores have them too.
The
3-hole punch I am using I got in the office supply aisle of my
regular store I get my groceries at. It cost under $10, if you don't
have one you can certainly use a single hole punch that you can
anywhere. It will just take a bit more time.
The
paper I used for all the printed pages is made by Georgia Pacific and
is their Super Premium Bright paper. I get mine in my regular store
near the three hole punches.
Let's
start with the weekly pages since that is what we will need to have
the most of. I got mine from the site Wendaful, she has some really
nice free printable pages as well as some stickers we will be using
in future weeks. The pages I used were the “Vertical Boxed Week on Two Pages” These looked the most like the pages that I have seen
being used on Youtube by different people doing PWM's so I that is
what I chose. Also this was on the of the few week on 2 page layouts
that I could get to print with boxes that were 1 ½” wide so that
the standard full box stickers made for the commercial planners would
fit. She has this same layout on a couple of different downloads be
sure to get the one that is set up as an “A5 on Letter Size”
paper.
The
website has some directions to print the pages successfully. I did
find with my printer I couldn't use the two sided printing option and
get the pages to come out correctly. So instead I printed page one
about 10 times then manually flipped my paper over so that it would
feed correctly and then printed page 2 the same number of times. My
printer seems to get out of whack when I try to print very many pages
at one time especially if I am trying to print on both sides of the
paper. Also be very careful to check that you are printing at 100%
size so that everything lines up correctly and is the correct size.
I
did notice that these pages have the cut lines at 5 ½” by 8 ¼”
instead of a more standard 5 ½” by 8 ½” (at least in my mind
that is more standard) I think that next year I will add the extra ¼”
to the bottom of each page as I am cutting them to give me just a
tiny bit more room on the pages.
For
the “month at a glance” pages I found some colorful ones a while
back at the Scattered Squirrel site. For this I picked the “half
size- 2 pages per month” calendar. Then when printing I told my
printer I wanted it to print horizontally with 2 pages per sheet of
paper. This way I only used 12 sheets of paper for the 12 months.
For
the year at a glance calendar I had to do a bit more manipulating to
get what I wanted. I am sure there are a lot of other calendars out
there that are set up for this size paper. In fact I think both the
above sites had some. I already had this one saved to my computer so
it is what I used. To get this to print the way I wanted it set up my
printer to horizontal orientation and to again print two pages per
sheet. I then printed one copy, and since I needed a second one for
another project I put my paper back in the printer and printed a
second one on the other half the page.
There
are so many other pages of printables available to customize your
planner with. These that I am using are just barely scratching the
surface. There are pages for financial planning, meal planning,
wedding planning, school planning, if you can think of it I am
betting there are pages that you can print off to add to your planner
for it.
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