De-Clutter and Make More Space: Throw Out DVD Cases!!

I once read of a couple that lived full-time in an RV, and in an effort to make space, got rid of all of their DVDs and DVD cases by tossing or recycling the cases, and downloading all of their movies onto an external hard drive.  I don't want all of our movies on a hard drive, but getting rid of the cases sounded awesome.  DVD/CD portfolio as a solution, anyone???

I tucked the idea away for future use and the knowledge became relevant last weekend when we updated our kiddos' room.  You see, we kept all of our DVDs in a beautiful vintage bench in the living room, but we wanted our daughter to be able to store her bedding inside--she uses the trundle bed of our daybed set which doesn't push under easily with all of her blankets on the mattress--after we moved the bench into their room.

Instead of finding a new place for all of those DVDs (we're trying to make EMPTY spaces, not fill up NEW spaces), we finally made the plunge and purchased a CD/DVD holder that fits 256 DVDs and filled up over two garbage bags with empty DVD cases.  It takes up less than one tenth of the space that all of the cases had and the kids love having another place to sit in their room.

Tips:

*  Make sure you purchase a case that will hold all of your DVDs and possibly have room to grow.

*  Take this opportunity to get rid of DVDs that are uninteresting to you, inappropriate, heavily scratched, unwanted, etc.  Donate or toss these DVDs and be happy for more free space!

*  If you don't organize your DVDs in your portfolio in some way, it may feel difficult to flip through.  We put children's movies together, workout DVDs together, etc.  You may want to go alphabetical, or by genre.

*  We have all 9 of the Seinfeld seasons and 7 of the The Office seasons.  Instead of putting them into the portfolio, we chose to leave them in their original cases as we didn't want to flip through that many DVDs to find the specific season and disc of the that season that we wanted, plus the cases actually have some information we enjoy.  You may want to consider doing the same with seasons.

With all of the space we've been de-cluttering, I feel so much more free!  It's a good feeling to know that unnecessary "stuff" is going away, leaving clear space.