Furlough Project #6 – DVD Storage

I am a Federal employee & was out of work on furlough from 12/22/2018 through 1/27/2019.  Thankfully we are back at work now!  I am still getting caught up with posting about the DIY projects I completed during the furlough.

My 6th furlough project was transferring my DVD collection from their plastic cases into a binder case.  I didn’t take any photos of the DVD towers before dismantling them.  Many of my furlough projects were very spontaneous and haphazard!  This pic from 2014 shows them in the far right corner of the dining room:

It was fun having the towers available in the dining room for whenever we wanted to grab a movie to watch, but that was happening less and less.  I moved the actual towers to the basement and stored the DVDs in boxes along the dining room wall temporarily:

I did an Amazon search for “DVD storage” and found this awesome $20 double-binder case [#affiliate] which holds 400 DVDs [or CDs]:

I wanted a case with actual binder rings so the pages could be removed & rearranged.  Amazon sells one under their own brand [#affiliate] which was more highly rated but has non-removable pages.  Some comments mentioned that if you’re at all OCD-ish about alphabetizing your collection it would drive you insane any time you bought a new DVD.  I pictured myself sitting on the floor moving 300 DVDs one by one just to fit a new one I’d bought.  I decided the double-binder case was a much better fit for me!

I started by pulling out all the DVDs from the boxes in the dining room starting with 0-9, A, B, C, & D and stacked them up alphabetically:

Then opened each DVD case, removed the DVD, slid it into a pocket in my binder, then tossed the DVD case into the recycle bin.  I found it was much easier to remove each binder page before filling.  Each page is double sided, so each page holds 8 DVDs back to back:

I did 4 letters at a time, which kept the number of DVDs I was dealing with to a manageable level.

The job went much faster than I expected!  It took about 2 hours to get all the DVDs stored and cases discarded.  I didn’t use all the pages in the binder so I removed them to make the binder easier to close.  Darwin helped me photograph the empty pages [of course]:

      

I will save them and maybe use them to store my CD collection…

I left some spaces blank in the DVD binder, usually between every 4th letter [i.e. between the Ds and the Es] to make it easier if/when I do buy any new DVDs.  The DVD case is super easy to close for storage:

       

      

And has a very handy carrying handle.  It’s currently on top of the original storage cubes in the dining room [which store mostly my stuff]:

      

I filled up 1½ lawn and leaf bags [we use them instead of a recycle bin] with DVD cases!!!:

      

PS – hubby’s DVD collection is stored in 3 of the lower cubbies in the new cube storage shelving I set up last week:

Stay tuned for my last furlough post which will include all the smaller, more random projects I got done.