When Stefan and I first started dating (a million years ago) one of the first things we bought together was the entire collection of James Bond DVD’s. And we didn’t even have a DVD player. You remember those days right…when only about one-quarter of the world had DVD players and the rest of us were just waiting for them to drop below $200 finally? Cause for a poor, starving college student, that was just a bit steep.
From there, our interest in DVD’s became a bit of an obsession and although we have curbed it slightly in the last few years, we still have well over 900 movies in our collection. That doesn’t include TV shows and now the madness that is Mackenzie’s Elmo fanaticism.
When we moved into our farmhouse 4 years ago, we had two enormous Billy shelves from IKEA to hold them all. It left us very few decorating options while also navigating around windows and radiators, so we eventually dropped down to just one shelf with two rows of DVD’s on each shelf…and about half of our DVD’s packed away in boxes in our attic. With only our favorites being out on the shelves, we very quickly grew sick of them…because even with 400 movies on the shelf, you still never find anything you want to watch. (Please tell me someone else also has this problem!)
I don't seem to have any photos of the overflowing shelves, but the one in the corner was our DVD center.
Now some people might say that at this stage you should just get rid of all the films you haven’t seen in years. But we actually watch most of these movies at least once a year and enjoy them. We don’t have our TV hooked up to cable so our only form of entertainment is these movies and a few American TV shows. We don’t think we’re really missing out on anything, we get to pick and choose what we want to watch instead of constantly having some nonsense in the background, and we’ve been really pleased with our decision to be more or less TV-free since 2007.
But back to the point of all this. What does one do with 900 DVD cases….and more CD’s than I have a desire to count? Let’s just put the number at somewhere near 600. We’re talking about 5 or so square yards of wall space here!
We discussed several ideas, one of which included building a really nice wall unit with deep drawers that would hold all of our movies and music. But we sadly just don’t have all that much time to take on a project like that right now and it’s not exactly something you can just throw together. So as we discussed moving things around in our living room again, we started looking for new options for our media case chaos. We wanted something that would not only be tidy, but also keep Mackenzie from pulling out the cases all the time and eventually playing with the discs (which would soon be scratched beyond recognition).
That’s when I realized that maybe we should look at using some large folders for discs to rehome all of our DVD’s. We’d store all the boxes in our attic, for a time when we might have more space or need them for whatever unknown reason; but instead of 900 boxes we’d just look at 4 folders. And box-set TV shows that we love the most would go into drawers under our new TV, with the rest going into another folder. Simple, easy to browse through, compact and effective. Plus a whole lot less to dust!
Yes, it was a bit of a pain to alphabetize 3 collections of movies (since we packed a bunch of them we didn’t watch so often and then packed some more when the single shelf was overflowing) and it took me about 8 mind-numbing hours over 4 days to get them all organized. But now the folders are stashed away under Stefan’s turntables in the living room and we just have a few flicks of the pages to start searching through the volumes. We’ll eventually put some sort of labels on them too so we know what part of the alphabet we’re on. It’s pure heaven!
No really. It might seem a little crazy — but not having our DVD’s all over the house is a relief. And knowing that they all fit in 5 folders that we can easily stash in a shelf which was already in the room instead of two bookshelves of their own is just a massive weight off our shoulders. We’ve been shuffling these things around for years and the big shelves worked fine — but when you have less space to make it work, it just isn’t fun anymore.
A word of caution: if you do decide to do this, make sure you leave plenty of space for new additions…and don’t get ahead of yourself like I did a few times. As I organized the DVD’s in loooong rows on the living room floor, I would think that I had all the “G” movies in front of me and start filing them into the folder…but then I’d go look in another box and there were more. So I had to move a bunch more movies again and shuffle stuff around. A total pain but oh so worth it.
What about the CD cases? I’m still working on that project (with the help of Mackenzie who loves to bring me the “CC’s” when they finish burning) by digitizing our entire collection of CD’s. I’ve got about one-quarter of them done and now need to dig the rest of them out of our attic. I just pop them into our computer in the office (which I hardly use because I’m addicted to my laptop) and Windows Media Player automatically starts ripping them for me, converting them to mp3 format (or wma, etc), pulling in the disc information over the internet and filing it all into a music folder for me. It really couldn’t be much easier than that.
Doing this has several benefits, really. Not only do we not have to have the cases sitting out somewhere (accessible to the dust bunnies and tiny curious fingers) but we can listen to the music over our internet radio (which has a wireless connection to our server) or on the iPod (which I doubt we will ever be able to fill with music). We’ve even bought a hard drive just for our music to lessen the risk of it getting sick or damaged (which has happened to us more often than I’d like to discuss).
Have you done anything to cut down on the clutter caused by media in your house? What’s your solution?
P.S. Did you enjoy reading this post? I would really appreciate your vote for the Best Blog in Germany. Go Overseas! is having a contest to rank their Germany blogs and I’ve been shortlisted. So go check out the competition and pick your favorite expat blog. The contest ends Wednesday, October 20th at 12pm Pacific.
I think I’m too OCD to bid farewell to all my DVD cases. Did you toss them or are they still packed away somewhere? We haven’t had cable in the 10+ years we’ve been married, and we haven’t missed it (or the expense) at all. We have lots of our favorite TV shows on DVD and now we have a hard time watching normal TV because all the commercials annoy us so much! I love being able to watch a one hour show in 45 minutes! 🙂
No, no. We stored them all in 3 boxes in our attic. I’m also not ready to kick the boxes to the curb, even if we never want to put them back in there. Part of me thinks we might want to put them back in the cases if we move somewhere with more space, to proudly show off our collection. But who knows. Some people are that brave and are encouraging me to make the cut — but it just somehow seems like a waste almost.
I can’t believe we used to spend €45/month to watch TV and barely even watched it anyway. The movies were all junk and stuff we already had on DVD (since it takes a while to arrive on cable here in Germany) and everything else wasn’t worth watching. MTV was what we had on most often and we could actually feel ourselves getting more and more dumb after every reality shows we watched. 🙂
I’m in the process of converting all our movies into video files and storing them on our home server which is hooked up to our tv. When I want to watch something it’s simple to go into itunes and find it and pull it up that way. No dvd to insert into the player. And no disc for little hands to scratch.
That was actually our first move about a year ago…but because our server was running with external hard drives, one of them just decided it didn’t want to connect anymore and so half of the work was gone in a blink. We’ve also had them dropped and so on, causing everything to be useless. So I’m a bit less than trusting of our server now lol. If we should build ourselves a nice computer with all internal drives, then I will definitely go the digital movie route again. It really couldn’t be any more practical and we LOVED it when we had most of them in there already.
But since we also run our server separate from our media PC (the latter is hooked up to our TV — well was until the flat screen and now we need a new graphic card *sigh*), if it won’t connect for whatever reason, we’re also outta luck. I love technology most of the time, but when it doesn’t work, it’s horrible. And we have had a lot of problems and meltdowns. 🙂
Aww, good for you. We did that to our DVDs a couple of years ago and it’s awesome! We have five cases… one with tv show full seasons, one with classic movies/musicals, one with family/kids movies, one with drama, and one with comedy. Even the OCD can be happy with that arrangement. ;o)
And… we’ve been carting around ALL of the boxes for like 5 years since this project and we just decided last week as we’re getting ready to move AGAIN, that we’re tossing them all. Goodbye DVD boxes. By the time we would want to sell them and move on to some other crazy movie watching technology, they won’t be worth anything anyway. Goodbye boxes!
That’s what I’m thinking too, Kim. If we ever sell our house and move back to the US or something like that, I would definitely consider tossing them out. In fact, I think we’d end up tossing and giving away a lot of stuff if that was the case. Moving it back is so expensive…and since we live in the house that IKEA built, most of our furniture wouldn’t make the move again anyway. Just some antiques we inherited with the house and other personal things.
Oh, man, while I converted my music to .mp3s years ago and stopped buying CDs, The Mann is still a CD buyer. We’ve been looking for a solution to get all of the CDs out of the living room, but he doesn’t like the binder things because he thinks the CD booklets won’t fit, too. Maybe I’ll show him this post to see if he’ll reconsider! LOL.
lol I’m pretty sure they still make folders like these that have a special space for the booklets too…or you just stick them beside them. I personally don’t need the booklets cause all the lyrics and other info are at your fingertips online anyway…and I guess if I really need a booklet (for God only knows what reason), they’re in a box in the attic. 🙂 We just bought cheapo folders and I would probably go for some more than about 10 bucks each cause these are flimsy — but at least it gave us a chance to know if we like the setup without going broke. Back in the day we bought a 200 disk folder and I swear that thing cost $45. But I could not be happier about our choice to move all those boxes outta here. You waste so much space having them around…and in our living room which sits on the street, you could totally see them all. Not so smart as a theft deterrent. Of course not they just see the flat screen lol. Although somehow I think I might cry more over the lost DVD collection — a TV is so much easier to replace 🙂
This is a constant problem for us. But we ripped all our CDs to Ipod, then left the discs in the US and then the computer died. So I don’t think we will ever do that again. I find the boxes make it a little (just a little) more difficult for the kids to destroy the DVDs (or at least they only destroy their own) so we got rid of the hanging DVD storage that we tried (on sale last year at Tchibo). It’s always fun to see how others attack the same problems that we all have:).
I did catch Mack playing with one of the DVD’s the first week we had everything put together and it might be a goner…but we keep them in a closed shelf so she really doesn’t see them and she’s pretty good about leaving stuff alone when she knows she’s not supposed to play with it. So it’s working out pretty good so far. We’ve had the meltdowns also with all our CD’s before…I guess that’s why we’re putting them on a totally separate drive now that only gets hooked up when it’s synced with the iPod. And we’ll have a backup of everything on our server…plus all the CD’s in the attic. But we definitely won’t be getting rid of them soon — computers are just far too unreliable still.
this blog is so very interesting., i love reading it., thanks for the information here….