Tuesday, May 11th
As a part of my ongoing attempt to corral clutter and organize our lives, I have been looking at what sources of clutter keep popping up. One of the biggies in the living room is the children’s games/movies. There would be at least one game and one DVD pulled out of two different cabinets at any given time. Truthfully, it would be more like 5-6 before I would tell the children they HAD to put all of them away before getting out something else. The other annoyance was not being able to easily find a movie or game. Was it in the tall cabinet? How about one of the drawers in the other cabinet? Once you located the box, was the desired disc even in there? Ugh!
I was influenced by Miss Jenn @ IHeartOrganizing‘s media storage ideas. She mentioned purchasing a few DVD organizers from the Container Store. I loved how colorful they were without being too busy. We’ve got a Container Store just north of our home, so I stopped by on one of the many trips we make to Denver.
Phase One: Pull all the videos & games out of their cases and plop one in each sleeve.
I only put one disc in each sleeve with a few exceptions (Boom Blox 1 & 2 share a sleeve front & back). This decision was made after reading some of the reviews on the Container Store website. It seems that while each box claims to store 200 discs, that makes for a really tight fit. I wanted to be able to flip through the sleeves easily, thus the one disc per sleeve.
Because many of our movies aren’t ones that we’ll necessarily wish to keep once the kids are further grown; I wanted to keep the cases for trading in, donating or giving to other friends. Luckily, I had just made a few purchases for Bradyn’s birthday & had an extra box handy. In went our movie cases and down to the basement for storage. I used a white Sharpie marker, my favorite labeling device, to clearly mark each side and the top of the box. The cases will now be easy to retrieve when needed. To give you a little perspective on just how large this box is, here is Alyson next to the box.
That box is FULL with cases. Just look at all the room we’ve saved! (And to think that’s just the movies. The games took up another box!)
Phase Two: Label each Storage Box
I purchased four containers; two for movies, one for games and one for expansion. The extra one wasn’t absolutely necessary but I do expect our collection to grow. I don’t want to have three matching bins and one mismatch. Call it a personal quirk, if you wish.
Each box will be labeled with a vinyl letter (they’re coming in the mail). That letter is then entered into the item’s info during Phase Three.
Phase Three: How to find what you want to play or watch
Now enters one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. It’s a $40 bit of software for the Mac called Delicious Library. I could gush about this program for far, far too long.
Here’s what I love about it:
- You can hold a DVD/game case up to your iSight camera and scan in the UPC code. Delicious Library will auto-magically look up the item and enter it into your library.
- You can type in the name of something and it’ll be looked up at Amazon for you to match.
- If there isn’t a good image of your item, you can drag a new one right into the item’s description.
- Easy peasy searching.
Would you like to view your videogames alphabetically? *click*
Do you need to see everything you own sorted by where you’ve stored it? *click*
When viewing your list by location, note that the “shelf” your item is displayed upon shows a range. This label corresponds to which box and sleeve the disc in question is stored. To view the exact sleeve number, you just *click* on that case image & the information is displayed on the right. It took Bradyn about 30 seconds to figure it all out. Your actual Adult-Learning-Time may vary, of course.
When a disc is pulled, that sleeve is placed in the front of the case. When the disc is returned, it is placed into the sleeve and refiled to the correct position in the storage case. The children are much more likely to replace every disc because they don’t want their games or movies scratched. It’s a little bit of extra motivation that has kept things picked up here. And that, my friends, makes this mama happy.
