DVD Storage & My Silhouette Cameo!

Guys I have been planning this post FOREVERRRRR. Ever since I read this post on my favorite blog, I knew Jen’s idea would work perfectly in our home! We have maybe 1200 DVDs, so stacking them in their boxes in a book case just didn’t work for us. They literally took up nearly two bookcases in our basement. On top of which it was hard to find a system to really organize them properly, there were just so.many. Ultimately we tried the solution below with one folder for funny/haha and another for scary/horror. We threw away all the plastic covers to cut down on space-that part was very nice.

Overall though, this solution, well it just wasn’t a good one. The pages fell out of the binder all the time. It was a pain to keep them alphabetical. And they were super heavy to haul around from room to room. We had, like, four of these bad boys! We literally never went in them-the storage solution just wasn’t working for us. That’s really what its all about right? Storage that works? Well sometimes the best laid storage plans fall apart anyhow-and that’s what this was for us. I felt like our DVDs were our Odyssey- never ending and arduous!

So when I read Jen’s post about media storage I took my happy self down to my new happy place:

Oh lord and I bought a bunch of these (with a coupon code online I was able to pay and pick them up there!).

The clear acrylic top pops off super easily for quick access to our collection.

Now these acrylic media bins definitely aren’t the cheapest thing on the market, I think I ultimately paid about $20 for each one, so I collected them over the course of about two months, every time I had an extra few dollars. They’re designed to hold up to 120 DVDs (or video games now that I think about it). I’ll be real right here though-if you stick 120 DVDs in this box you won’t be able to access anything because they fit too tightly. That was a little bit of a bummer because they’re sold as a 120 DVD holder-but I digress. I took the last yellow section of inserts out and just saved them in a bag for later use. I only have about 100 DVDs in each box. That’s how many fit well so you can still slide the inserts around enough to see what you’re looking for.

They also came with these handy dandy indices, though I ultimately decided not to use them in favor of something a little more personal (that’ll come later in the post). You could certainly use these though and they’re super straight forward! So I started organizing y’all. I separated all my DVDs out in to the following categories:

• BluRay (so guests know not to put these in the regular DVD player!)
• Comedy
• Drama
• Horror
• Action/SciFi
• Animated/Kid
• Romantic/Comedy

After I had them all separated out I started the {somewhat} arduous task of placing all the DVDs into the sleeves. But ultimately it looked kinda awesome! It also took up so much less space and was more portable since you can grab just the “comedy” box and take it with you if you want.

And then our house sold, and we had to move out in a month, and we had to finish renovating it first, and we had to clean it all up, and we had to paint everything….you get the point right? I had to put the project away partially finished {which I hate}.

So a few weeks ago when we finally got moved into the in-laws house {temporarily}, I brought the project back up. I had asked my husband for a Silhouette Cameo for my birthday. Its a pretty big ticket purchase but we actually don’t do much for each other for Christmas typically, birthdays are usually a bigger deal in our house. So this year he did get me the Cameo Silhouette-I’m such a lucky girl!

Its beautiful y’all.

Look at it in those early morning rays…….(in case you’re wondering its sitting in my office at work!)

{I haven’t even used these yet-what are they?! Are they amazing?! What do they do?! I don’t know-but I’m gonna find out!}

I decided to use my DVD storage project as a great way to first try out my Cameo.  I finally had all my DVDs in the correct bins, but no way to tell what was what without flipping through. Again, not a great system or a usable system. So after about 8 hours of cursing at my Cameo and calling tech support and reading forums, I made this:

Had a little bit of an oops with the “a” in animated but that’s a whole other deal. I created labels for the front of each bin so we’d know exactly which genre of movie lived there. See?

But there’s a teensy little OCD part of my brain that really didn’t like seeing the DVDs there in the front. It distracts from the letters. Ours will ultimately live in our TV cabinet, so they’ll be hidden. But the reality is when I open up that TV cabinet I want it to look neat and organized. Plus I want the letters to be very easily readable when the cabinet doors are open.  What I decided to do was cut a 5×5 inch piece of kraft paper to tape to the front of each bin. This totally helped make the bins a little more organized and cohesive. Of course it also highlights that I made a few of the words too long, but I digress.

I love it! Eventually if I decide the paper should be more of a pattern or perhaps even a color, I can change it easily.

So the next part of the project was to make an inventory of what we had for findability. I purchased IHeartOrganizing’s custom media printable here. Jen customized the printable with our last name so its all fancy and such! I went through each DVD case and wrote down the names of DVDS we had, using the numbers that are already printed on each and every sleeve.  I did leave spaces for DVDs I know we have but couldn’t find. Or DVDs where I’m sure we’ll ultimately purchase the sequel etc. It’s so organized!

Since we have so many of these acrylic cases, I decided to put our inventories into a notebook. Each box has its own labeled inventory page and they all live here:

Extra kraft paper is in the back of the notebook as well, in case we need to update more boxes in the future!

And that’s the DVD solution we ultimately utilized, thanks to a fabulous idea from Jen at IHeartOrganizing! Here are a couple of final looks: