52 Weeks of Organizing Week #1 : Taming the DVD mess

Laura over at I'm an Organizing Junkie has issued a year long organizing challenge.  Instead of focusing on getting organized in a one month challenge she has challenged her readers to make small changes weekly to put you on the path to organization and hopefully keep it that way!

Since becoming clutter free and better organized is on my list of priorities this year, I decided to take her challenge and have been slowly tackling my out of control areas.  I love doing it week by week.  I feel I have more time to get things done. Some weeks I might be able to tackle 3 or 4 areas, and other weeks I might be able to just focus on one (although the office might take me a whole month!).  There is no rush, and I am creating good habits by finishing what I started and keeping it organized.

So what have I been up to?

Underneath the entertainment center has always been a huge mess.  This is where I keep all the DVDs and the CDs (those that we still have...we have converted to digital for most of our music).  We have a corner entertainment center so the storage underneath is a very large cabinet but a funny shaped.  I have tried alphabetizing and stacking the DVDs but I had to create several rows to make them all fit.  Not only did this method make things hard to find, but inevitably the kiddos would go looking for something and I would end up with a huge mess each and every time.

Here is the before:

Several months ago I found and fell in love with this baby:

Unfortuneatly after receiving 4 damaged cabinets the company decided that they were just going to reimburse me and not attempt to send me another cabinet.  I was heartbroken because it is exactly what I was looking for, it was gorgeous and looked perfect where I wanted to put it.  I also had my hopes up that the disaster under the entertainment center would soon be solved and I was now back to square one.  They did give me the option of keeping the damaged cabinet and taking a credit.  However, they were only offering me a $40 credit on a $279 piece of furniture and it the top was cracked and the trim all broken.  I could have fixed it but it would have been more than $40 and I really felt the piece was overpriced to begin with.

The Saturday after Thanksgiving I picked up some photo/DVD storage boxes at Michael's.  I think they were on sale 3 for $5 and I had a 40% off coupon...score!  I originally intended to organize my photos with them (because I thought I would have the library cabinet), but soon realized they had a greater purpose in life. 

Here is the after:

The boxes house all of our regulary viewed DVDs.  The kid's movies are housed in boxes labeled by letter.  I have my own labeled box (Vampires, Wizards and Pirates) and another houses the movies my hubby and I like to watch.   On the side I still have room to stack our remaining CDs and in back I have a few extra boxes that hold VHS tapes and home videos.  This is so much better and we have managed to stay alphabetized and in order for over 2 weeks now.

Linking up to: