Simple Country Living: Keeping It Simple | A Space Saving Way To Store DVDs

I’ve been on a bit of a decluttering binge over the summer holidays. Holidays always feel more productive to me when I have a few small projects to do. On the hit list was the bookcase, the filing cabinet, and the lounge room in general. The lounge room is actually pretty good, with the exception of the shelf where the DVDs are kept.

DVDs are one of those things that take up a lot of space (particularly considering how small the actual disk is), and make a room look cluttered if they are on display. Ours have been sitting on a shelf in our lounge room since we moved here, and they were annoying me. I was perusing pinterest for some ideas to get rid of the clutter, when I saw the idea of popping them into DVD sleeves. This way, ten DVDs take up the same space as only two DVDs in their plastic cases. I was sold on the idea.

I spent a bit of time researching the different types of sleeves, and ways of storing them, and then came up with a system where we put all the DVDs are in sleeves and then loosely sorted into two boxes. I got the sleeves from ebay, and bought 200 sleeves for about $20 plus postage (Office supply shops also have them, but there are none near the farm). I still have one pack of 50 spare, which I have popped in the back of one of the boxes so that any future DVDs are catered for.

It is very easy to switch the DVDs from their cases to the sleeves.

1. Open the case so that the paper label will slide out easily.

2. Flatten the label so that the spine faces towards the front.

3. Slide the label into the front of the sleeve. If there were any additional booklets etc with the DVD I popped them in the front too.

4. Slide the DVD into the pocket on the rear of the sleeve. If there was a second DVD such as a special features DVD I put the second DVD into the sleeve with the original.

I had seen DVDs kept in sleeves in a folder, but I thought that the folder would be too awkward to store and flip through, so instead I sorted them into kids and grown up programs (adult programs sounded a bit dodgy), and put them into two plastic boxes. I then further sorted them into movies and television programs. I used some of the spare plastic covers to create dividers. I thought that these would make it a little easier to find the DVD we were looking for.

I did consider alphabetising them, but thought I was making a rod for my back. Particularly with the kids.

What about series with lots of DVDs?

We have several television series that take up quite a few DVDs. I used our printer to copy the front label page, cut it out, and slipped it into a second label. I put the first two disks with the original label, and then the rest in copied labels – two per sleeve. This does mean that some series will have several sleeves. Another alternative could be to tie the sleeves of each series together. I’m going to see how this works for us before I try any further improvements.

It did take me several hours to transfer all the DVDs. The longest part was sorting out the television series with six or seven DVDs. How long it will take you really depends on how many DVDs you have.

We used to have two and a half shelves stacked with DVDs in plastic cases. Everytime one was taken out the rest fell over and it looked messy. Now we have the two tubs in the buffet cabinet under our television. Much more compact and out of sight.

Have you got a clever way of storing DVD’s? Have you tried using DVD sleeves?

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Hi, I’m Jo