After last week’s post, I had one of those weeks that ends with thinking “What else could happen?”–but me not being completely insane, I didn’t dare think it. The baby had already gotten her first cold, and then RocketMan got it, and then come Monday, I got it, and missed two days of work; then RocketBaby had a reaction to her MMR vaccine (low-grade fever that wasn’t serious, but extremely annoying) AND she decided to get a few molars in. Then after a night in which I’d only gotten 5 hours of sleep, we awoke Friday morning to RocketMan’s back being officially out. And a bunch of other stuff, too, that I won’t get into, but suffice to say: crazy week.
So I’m thrilled to say that last week’s post implanted a wild hair firmly in my behind, and I was determined to impose some order on our chaos. I’d long since filed Buffy, Angel, Dr. Who and Supernatural into a variety of CD cases, but none of them allowed for expansion, which is a problem, as Dr. Who and Supernatural are still on the air. And we’d already transferred some of the less-viewed movies (specifically, my musicals and Disney movies) into a three-ring binder, so we knew it was a system we liked. Our only reason for having some of the DVDs out was the “browse” factor–what if we want to look at the cases when we want to watch a movie? But I’d found that flipping through the binders wasn’t so bad, after all, and honestly? When I want to watch Star Wars, I want to watch Star Wars, and the only question is which one.
By my calculations, if we’d had every DVD on the shelf–say .5 inch wide per DVD, given or take a few (for box sets), we would take up approximately 140 square feet: 16.5 feet of shelf space, each at 8.5 inches high. At the point that we bindered up all our DVDs, we were using about 70 square feet of shelf space.
Waste a lot of space, you do.
We had DVDs by the stereo, DVDs on the shelves (next to a ton of baby books) and DVDs stacked on the end table. And Dr. Who AND Supernatural will be releasing their fifth seasons this fall, and I still haven’t found a used copy of Johnny Dangerously. All in all, we bought three boxes of Case Logic CD/DVD Album Refill Pages and four three-ring binders, for a grand total of about $100; one binder and one box of the pages are in the closet, waiting for our next trip to Rasputin. (By the by, I see no reason to drop $25 on a CD binder–three-ring binders cost $2.99 and unless you’re planning on traveling with them, do the job just fine.)
Check out the results: we actually removed a shelf, and are now using 17 square feet of shelf space, for a savings of 53 square feet–123 square feet if you count all of our DVDs. Not bad.
We're only making it better.
Of course, I whipped out the labelmaker (who doesn’t love a labelmaker?). All the DVD cases (and most of the bonus DVDs) will be going into storage.
Bonus material gets its own binder. We're putting most of them in storage.
As for browsing, most DVDs have fancy labels, so we’ve got no problems there. Just take sci-fi/fantasy off the wall, open it up, and browse away.
With two spaces for #7 and #8!
Next week (I hope): book-packing!
I bought a big CD binder on Ebay for about $25 and used it for my CDs. Like a doof, I never thought about using it for DVDs.
Since I’m moving I should consider it. I’d get rid of one more bulky bookcase.