Home: Organising DVD's

A while ago I saw a post on a friend's blog and it was a proper TA-DAH lightbulb moment.  

We have a lot of DVDs. My 5 year old is a film addict so we've built up a substantial collection of children's DVDs, along with all my favourite films and TV boxsets.  Storage of DVD's has always been somewhat of an issue for me. Back in the day, I used to love proudly displaying my display collection on a glass DVD tower but then my collection got too big. And I decided I didn't like the clutter. So out went the tower and the DVDs went into drawers for a little bit. They were taking up masses of space so I decided to take them out of the cases and pop them into one of those CD storage folders, like this.  This was actually a really good solution but I had nowhere to keep the folders and they tended to just get shoved under the sofa, where over time they got mullered and ripped.  I wasn't entirely sure what to do with them next so they just kind of festered until I was reading some blogs one day.

The idea was very simple really - filing them in neat little storage boxes. I don't know why I never thought of it before, such a simple idea but very practical!  First I had to assemble supplies - I bought some rather nice sturdy cardboard boxes from Ikea. Then I bought some large A-Z dividers and some plastic CD wallets/protective covers from Ebay. Ebay were by far the cheapest and I think I bought about 1000 covers for around £6 in the end.   With supplies assembled I was ready to commence the project.

It was a bit of a daunting task but I dug out all the DVDs in the house - the ones in folders, the ones in cases, the ones in little CD filing drawers, stuck on the Friends marathon on Sky and launched myself into it.

It took me an entire Sunday but secretly I enjoyed it. It appealed to the inner librarian in me as I harnessed my slight OCD tendencies and alphabetised every individual DVD whist having minor crisises of confidence over  things like whether Mamma Mia should go in Children's (as it's them that mainly watch it) or in Films and where to titles that begin with a number get filed... Mr M said I was over-thinking it a bit. Ahem.

In the end I ended up with about five very neatly filed boxes of DVDs and it was SUCH a therapeutic job.  It's a few months now since I started the new system and it's working so well - especially as I put my hands straight onto the film I want without having to trawl through folders or piles of DVDs.

The boxes sit neatly on a shelf in the living room and the clutter-factor in my living room has been reduced dramatically! I'm going to do Wii games next. (And yes, if you look carefully at the side of that last picture yo can see some more waiting to go into the filing system).

And there you have it! A rather cheap and easy way of keeping DVDs tidy whilst not using up too much space.

How do you store your DVD collection?

PS In case you were wondering where I kept all the empty DVD cases - they're in the loft!