), instead of taking a risk with a new movie! Or if I'm in the mood for, say, a sad movie with a happy ending, I know exactly which movie to grab (hello, P.S. I Love You
!). The coming months will feature a few of my faves!For now, though, let me tell you about how I have organized our DVDs. We have a lot of DVDs, and we got to the point where I was shopping for a second bookshelf to hold them all. We weren't even sure where we'd put the extra bookshelf, much less not wanting our DVD collection to be the visual centerpiece of our entire family room. It didn't help that our collection was on display for the world to see and we had an incident where several families from church came over for dinner and one of the pastor's sons immediately went to our collection and made a really public comment in awe of how many "adult movies" we had! Thankfully we were able to quickly clarify that he meant PG-13 and R rated movies, but even so it reminded us that when we had kids started hosting playdates, it may not be great to have every episode of every season of The Sopranos
on display for little eyes.I tried several different storage methods, including DVD towers, disc-only binders, and using slimmer jewel cases. In the end, I found an even better solution that we just love.
Whenever we get a new DVD or Blu-Ray, I put the discs in one of these plastic envelopes
and place it in this box
. I bought these dividers
to alphabetize the discs (we alphabetize just by letter, we're not that anal about it!) for quicker finding. When I have time, I use this template I made to create a little info sheet on the movie that includes Title, Year, Run Time, Format (DVD/Blu-Ray), and a picture of the DVD Case from Google. Notice I say "when I have time"....the majority of our discs don't have the info sheets yet and that's okay! Most times we can tell what DVD it is by looking at the disc through the sleeve. A side perk has been because we only need the disc, we are now able to buy disc-only movies. You know how when you buy a Blu-Ray, it comes with both a Blu-Ray disc and a DVD disc? A lot of people sell the DVD disc as a "Disc Only" sale on sites like eBay. For a lot of movies, we're not married to the idea of buying the Blu-Ray version, so if we're willing to take just the DVD, we can buy it for just a few dollars sometimes! Plus, places like Redbox sell disc-only versions of used rentals for only a few bucks.
What used to take up an entire bookshelf and then some now takes up part of just one shelf! Plus, it's easier to take DVDs with us on the go, and it's easier to find a DVD quickly! Not to mention these boxes are less tempting for our toddler to mess with AND the pastor's family can now come over with no worries about our "adult movies"! 😊
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