Week One:
Every week on FRIDAY for five (5) weeks (including this one!), I'm going to post one challenge related to either organizing, cleaning or general house improvement. Each week will focus on a different room/area of the house. Once the five weeks are up you'll have completed just five small tasks, but your house will be cleaner and more organized; just like that!
For "Week ONE" we are going to focus on the living room or wherever you watch tv/movies, etc. the most. You likely spend a lot of your free time here so why not make it a little more organized!
With DVDs selling for record low prices thanks to Internet renting services like Netflix and Hulu, a lot of people have more DVDs than ever!
This week's task will be to purge and organize all your DVDs:
Note: There are of course ways to reduce the amount of space your DVDs take up (binders, inserts, etc.), but personally, I like to keep the original case and booklets so it's easier if in the future I decide to sell or donate some. Always remember though, only you know what is going to work best for you!
First, go around the house and gather all your DVDs into one or more piles. Don't forget to find any errant DVDs that may have made their way into other rooms.
Second, choose/set a defined space where you'd like your DVDs to live from now on (known from this point forward as their new home). For my DVDs, I have two CD/DVD towers of which I will be using the bottom half of both of them.
Third, purge purge purge! Go through all your DVDs and make FOUR piles (or use four boxes/bins, bags, whatever is easiest for you - label if you need to) as follows:
Fourth, remember in the second step when you choose that defined space for all your DVDs to live? You're going to put your DVDs into their new home. But hold on there, not so fast... You probably have a lot more DVDs than their new home allows. This is where it gets fun (at least for me anyway!).
Enjoy your newly organized DVD space! If you want, you can take the time now to re-order them by film type (drama, romance, horror, etc.) or alphabetically if you choose. I order mine by type (TV series, animated/cartoon, Christmas, movie) then alphabetically within those four categories.
I'll be sharing my progress (before and after pictures) below once the week is up! Please feel free to share how YOU did either my emailing me or using the comment section below! I'd love to see your before and afters!
Update:
Below are my before and after pictures. Some of our DVDs were already being kept on the shelves we wanted to use for their new home, but most of them were being stored in an ottoman. We wanted to have one area for all the DVDs so that we could see at a glance what movies/tv shows we had. As you can see, we only had space for about 80 DVDs. We started with almost double that. It took us less than 20 minutes to finish this challenge.
To pare the DVDs down to an amount that would fit in their new home we followed the steps I outlined above. We were able to fit all of our LOVE pile, but had to go through our SORT OF LIKE pile one at a time. Mr. T. and I each took turns selecting one DVD at a time out of our SORT OF LIKE pile that we wanted to keep until we ran out of room.
Our plan to keep the shelves looking this way is whenever we get a new DVD, we have to give away/sell one of the old ones. We actually keep a box/basket by the door for items to donate and when it gets full we drop it off while we're out doing errands. If we didn't have a system to continuously maintain the system, it could quickly get out of control!
How did you do on this challenge?
For "Week ONE" we are going to focus on the living room or wherever you watch tv/movies, etc. the most. You likely spend a lot of your free time here so why not make it a little more organized!
With DVDs selling for record low prices thanks to Internet renting services like Netflix and Hulu, a lot of people have more DVDs than ever!
This week's task will be to purge and organize all your DVDs:
Note: There are of course ways to reduce the amount of space your DVDs take up (binders, inserts, etc.), but personally, I like to keep the original case and booklets so it's easier if in the future I decide to sell or donate some. Always remember though, only you know what is going to work best for you!
First, go around the house and gather all your DVDs into one or more piles. Don't forget to find any errant DVDs that may have made their way into other rooms.
Second, choose/set a defined space where you'd like your DVDs to live from now on (known from this point forward as their new home). For my DVDs, I have two CD/DVD towers of which I will be using the bottom half of both of them.
Third, purge purge purge! Go through all your DVDs and make FOUR piles (or use four boxes/bins, bags, whatever is easiest for you - label if you need to) as follows:
- LOVE (you can watch it over and over again without getting sick of it)
- SORT OF LIKE (you liked it or it was alright, you might watch it again in the future or brand new DVDs that you haven't even opened yet)
- HATE/DON'T LIKE (you wouldn't care if you didn't know this one existed)
- NOT YOURS (belongs somewhere or to someone else)
Fourth, remember in the second step when you choose that defined space for all your DVDs to live? You're going to put your DVDs into their new home. But hold on there, not so fast... You probably have a lot more DVDs than their new home allows. This is where it gets fun (at least for me anyway!).
- Put all of the DVDs that are in your LOVE pile in their new home.
- Get rid of (sell, donate, give away, return) any DVDs that are in piles 3 (HATE/DON'T LIKE) and 4 (NOT YOURS). Put them in a box/bag by your door, in the car, in the middle of your floor, do whatever it is going to take to get them out of your house the soonest!
- Have enough room to put your pile 2 (SORT OF LIKE) DVDs in their new home? Great! Go ahead. If not,
- Go through your pile 2 (SORT OF LIKE) again, picking the DVDs you want to keep/like the best and putting them away. Keep choosing DVDs one at a time and putting them in their new home until there is no more space left. Note: If you're having a hard time parting with some of your DVDs, keep in mind that almost every movie/tv show ever made is either available for free online or through an internet renting/service program (like Netflix). Is it worth the space and stress to keep those three/ten/fifty DVDs that you MAY want to watch again someday?
- Take any DVDs you have leftover (can't fit into the space you chose) from pile 2 and add them to the box/bag/car and get rid of them!
Enjoy your newly organized DVD space! If you want, you can take the time now to re-order them by film type (drama, romance, horror, etc.) or alphabetically if you choose. I order mine by type (TV series, animated/cartoon, Christmas, movie) then alphabetically within those four categories.
I'll be sharing my progress (before and after pictures) below once the week is up! Please feel free to share how YOU did either my emailing me or using the comment section below! I'd love to see your before and afters!
Update:
Below are my before and after pictures. Some of our DVDs were already being kept on the shelves we wanted to use for their new home, but most of them were being stored in an ottoman. We wanted to have one area for all the DVDs so that we could see at a glance what movies/tv shows we had. As you can see, we only had space for about 80 DVDs. We started with almost double that. It took us less than 20 minutes to finish this challenge.
To pare the DVDs down to an amount that would fit in their new home we followed the steps I outlined above. We were able to fit all of our LOVE pile, but had to go through our SORT OF LIKE pile one at a time. Mr. T. and I each took turns selecting one DVD at a time out of our SORT OF LIKE pile that we wanted to keep until we ran out of room.
Our plan to keep the shelves looking this way is whenever we get a new DVD, we have to give away/sell one of the old ones. We actually keep a box/basket by the door for items to donate and when it gets full we drop it off while we're out doing errands. If we didn't have a system to continuously maintain the system, it could quickly get out of control!
How did you do on this challenge?
Please note: Your results will vary! As with most of these challenges, I have organized most areas of my home already, so my results will probably not be typical.