Throughout the school year, notices about fun fairs, order forms for books, and reminders about soccer games pile up on Silke Lester's kitchen counter.
Ms. Lester, who has a seven-year-old, uses one of the most common household paperwork systems: urgent items on top, not-so-important stuff sinks to the bottom.
"It all goes into the recycling bin anyway, so it feels like you're wasting a lot of paper," the Greensville, Ont., resident says. "There's only a bit of it that you need."
Families are drowning in a flood of paperwork. A Statistics Canada report last year found paper consumption for printing and writing has doubled in the past 20 years. The average Canadian now uses about 20,000 pages annually. Part of that is more snail mail: Canada Post handled 10.7 billion pieces in 2003 - up from 6.6 billion in 1983. Courier mail rose over the same period as well.
In response, homes are adapting to make way for more paper: Desks are popping up in kitchens and filing stations are being built in front halls and mudrooms.
"People are asking for more kitchen desks, asking for places to do homework, plan meals, pay bills and sort mail," Toronto residential designer Eliza Billes says.
And, increasingly, homeowners are looking for organizational solutions that don't disturb the decor.
Ottawa kitchen design consultant June Fillmore has been asked by clients to find ways to control clutter that are aesthetically pleasing. "If you've got a $50,000 kitchen, the last thing you need is a $3.99 bulletin board from Canadian Tire," she says.
Ms. Fillmore often suggests posting items inside kitchen cupboard doors or using armoires. For one client, Ms. Fillmore crafted wine-rack-style cubbyholes to organize kids' paperwork. Clients need these spaces "to hide things away," she says.
Catering to this trend, some kitchen cabinet manufacturers now even offer file drawers to match the cupboards and drawers.
Impression Homes of London, Ont., builds mudrooms with expensive cabinetry to hide all the incoming mail. In one Impression home, the 15-by-15-foot mudroom/laundry room has been designed to handle and hide all family paperwork with a built-in desk, walls covered in cabinets to accommodate cubbyholes and drawers for newspapers, bills and kids' artwork.
"The thing everyone hates is clutter," developer Mira Vranic says. "And this allows them to get rid of it."
Retailers have also responded to the demand. Swedish home-furnishings giant IKEA now offers such household organization products as chalkboards with mail sorters.
The Container Store in the United States has seen a marked rise in sales for items to equip the home office, which has increasingly become a domestic command centre, according to Mona Williams, the chain's vice-president of buying.
Still, families continue to be besieged by paper clutter. Vancouver mother Lisa Martin was so overwhelmed by the paper avalanches from her son's school that she wrote about it on the website of her coaching and consulting company, Briefcasemoms.com. "Nobody warned me," Ms. Martin says of her son's Grade 1 year.
Some schools, mindful of trees and pennies, say they have tried to communicate electronically instead. Principal Derek Carter of Bedford South School in Halifax tries not to send out notices other than the bimonthly newsletter. The newsletter was also published electronically for a time, but he has switched back to paper.
"There's something to be said for hard copy," he says. "Parents seem to appreciate it - like reading a newspaper."
Even with the help of kitchen filing cabinets and hallway organizers, so much paperwork is flooding in that homeowners say they simply have to learn to stay on top of the deluge.
"Whenever a piece of paper comes into the house, I deal with it," Ms. Martin says. She sorts mail into his and hers, putting her son's stack into a binder. "Most of the time, it stops the pile of paper."