Before and After

I thought I'd share some before and after pictures of my weekly 2024 planner. It's Tomoe River Paper (TRP) and this was the first time I'd used it. As it turned out, I absolutely love this paper even though it's much thinner than the normal 80-pound paper my daily planner had.

Originally, I bought this planner for 2024 to help me keep track of my dad's appointments, but he passed away at the end of 2023 and I didn't really do much with the planner for most of the year.

Then August happened. I suddenly looked at the 365+ blank pages behind the weekly spreads and went GAH!

I began journaling to use up the blank pages.

And then I began decorating the planner with stickers and washi tape and vellum. I tipped in a whole lot of vellum paper because I liked how pretty it was, and I had a pack of vellum so I could print my own.

And the more I decorated the book, the more I used it, and I started carting it along with me everywhere. It's a B6 size, so much more portable than my official A5 spiral planner.

For 2025, I am using another Tomoe River Paper planner. This one will have a lot fewer decorations because it's my every day, official 2025 planner. I'll put in occasional stickers, but not much more than that. I did, however, buy another weekly planner and that one I plan to decorate like I did this one.

Are you ready for the before and after pictures and how I chunked up my 2024 planner?

Side view of my 2024 planner as received.

Side view of my 2024 planner around August. Before I started decorating it like mad.

And here are three views of my chunked up, finished 2024 planner:

Front view. You can see I put a bunch of Post-it flags/tabs in there to mark different things I wanted to find again.

Side view of my chunked-up planner. The gold coating is still on the edges of the pages, but you can't see it because of the chunk.

Top view. More tabs to flag out things I want to find again. Also, I'm using Oli Clips to mark out the different sections. The first one is for the monthly pages, the second it for the weekly pages, and I used the final one to keep track of where I was writing.

I think it's wild how much thicker this planner became in the year I used it. Actually, in the final five months that I used it because before August, it remained close to how it arrived. This was just so much fun to decorate, and while I don't feel like I want to do this to my official planner for 2025, I am looking forward to chunking up my weekly B6 planner. I wonder if I can get it chunkier than 2024's version?