A great solution

We’ve been in condensing mode here, as a result of combining our two offices. We each did a small amount of weeding out stuff when we moved into the new house a year and a half ago, but there wasn’t really much incentive because it was such a bigger space and there were so many nice closets. Since we moved ourselves, the major advantage was than anything we tossed only had to be moved once (out to the curb) instead of twice (out of the old place and into the new). Since then, there have been a few small purges, and I’ve sold lots on Craigslist, but we both still have a pretty large collection of things.

With all of the office shuffling, we’ve started thinking more seriously about what should stay vs. what should go. This applies to furniture, certainly, but also to things like music collections (which we’re going to digitize – major space saver!), books, and all of the random, mostly useless things that seem to accumulate and then get moved around just because they’re familiar or might be useful someday.

One of the more exciting decisions, in my opinion, came when we started eyeing the DVD shelves.

I’ve never loved that shelf – it’s enormous, and proportionately something about it is just really off. But we have a ton of DVDs, and the shelves are so expensive for what they are, and so it seemed like the best we were going to do. I’ve been entertaining ideas of building a shelf, though it would be expensive, time-consuming, and you’d still be able to see all of the ugly cases. But then we finally made the mental leap needed to take the discs out of their cases – originally we were thinking wallets, but Kevin found these for even less money:

Three of them hold all of the DVDs, plus extra room if we find ourselves with more. Here they are on top of the old shelves, for scale:

I printed up nice, organized lists of all of the DVDs in the cases – once you know the slot number of the movie, you slide the little table over to the correct position and open the case, and it picks out the DVD for you. Clever.

Now these guys can live in our utility closet, the dvd shelf can join the large collection of things out in the garage waiting to be Craigslisted, and we can finally start working on putting the framed photos up on the wall. Nice improvements all around!