Selena was in awe. She was at the home party of a decorator, whose condo was much smaller than ours, but it felt so spacious — everything had a place, and everything in its place made sense. Selena came home inspired and for the past few months we have been striving to upgrade our home. The first step: removing the clutter.
One place we made an early difference was tackling the DVD collection. It had grown so large it took up an entire bookshelf on its own. We started by taking a good look at the movies we owned and sending some out to pasture. Pulling films like Click and EuroTrip (which we really couldn’t recall when or why we ever bought) removed a few dozen, but there were still a couple hundred more to tackle.
So, we had to make a tough call. We liked being able to see all our DVDs at a glance, but we determined that we would prefer having that shelf space back. So, we found a series of four nice leather-bound albums that would each hold 50 DVDs and their liner sleeves. We popped the discs out, put the plastic cases in storage, and alphabetized. It only took a couple of hours, including photocopied the box cover for those that didn’t come with a liner sleeve.
In the end it takes a moment or two longer to find the DVD we are looking for, but we reduced five shelves of DVD cases down to half a shelf of leather-bound albums. It’s a start.
Are you interested in trying to declutter? Here are a few more good ideas to get started yourself. Also, if you have a good decluttering tip or story, please include it in the comments.
Funny…I was just saying to myself this morning that we should do this…I’ve done something similar with my CD’s…which is nice, but can be a pain when trying to find something quickly for a car ride.
Wow, it’s like your own episode of Clean Sweep! Bravo!
Me? I’m just planning to buy new furniture to house my overgrown CD collection….
Our house has a ‘No Net Gain’ policy. Prior to large shopping sprees or gift-getting events, we have a rule to purge so the items entering equal the amount being given to the thrift store. It never works 100%, but it makes these times more manageable. What did you guys do with all the old DVD boxes?
We stacked all the DVD cases on the highest shelf in the closet, the one that was empty cause it was too high to reach anyway. That’s the short term solution, to make sure we can get by without them, if so they may move to the storage unit.
I’m a minimalist and Paul is the opposite (what would that be… a maximumist???)…so that makes my goal of decluttering quite a challenge. As soon as I reorganize a shelf, he sees more space to throw more stuff! We now have TWO junk drawers in our kitchen. I think the hardest thing to declutter is the piles of paperwork and mail. The link on your blog offered great suggestions for this! I put it on my “favorites” list. Thanks! Sherry
[...] for a good cause. Greg did this on a very small scale in December offering advice and insight about de-cluttering, but the major groundbreaking post was Selena opening up on the blog and expressed her disdain for [...]