Organizing our DVDs

Though I'm a Netflix nut, I still have a pretty extensive collection of movies and TV shows on DVD. I like to keep our living room looking streamlined, and piles of DVDs don't exactly help. So I had to find ways to keep our TV stand from looking too cluttered!

I'm going to share the system I've had in place for the past year and a half. It's worked pretty well over time, so I think it's a winner! And it keeps our TV stand from looking overstuffed:

So here's what I did. First I removed all of our movie DVDs from their bulky cases. Both the cases themselves and the inserts are recyclable, so I took them to our recycling center. Then I alphabetized the films and popped the DVDs into two brown leather storage cases that I bought at WalMart a few years back. I put A-L in one case and K-Z in another.

here's plenty of room for more DVDs in both--I'd say they each hold around 50 now. Imagine 100 DVDs being stashed on our TV stand. That's how many are held in these two cases!

I also leave open slots with post-it note labels if there's a movie I know I want to buy, or a movie that someone else has borrowed (in which case I'll write their name on the post-it). It helps remind me to leave the slot open! When I buy or receive new DVDs, I usually wait until I have a little stack of them (at least 5) before putting them in so that I don't have to shift around the existing movies to only add one in.

The stand itself also has two fairly deep drawers, so I use those to stash most of our TV on DVDs. I didn't want to remove those from their cases because often they're in special cases, and I wanted to keep our movie and TV DVDs separate. Someday I might buy another large case to stash the TV shows in, but for now the drawer works great!

The other drawer houses larger TV on DVD packs, like the Sex and the City series and LOST season 5 special edition--and, oops, a few DVDs and Blu-Rays I need to stick in our binders!



The green basket on the first shelf holds our special edition movies--the Jurassic Park and Lord of the Rings trilogies (extended edition, baby!) They're both in special cases, so I didn't want to remove them from their beautiful homes!





The remaining "special" DVDs (like the Harry Potter films on Blu-Ray) and our exercise DVDs are stashed in these brown photo storage boxes from Michael's.







And two more storage boxes (these ones from JoAnn's) slide under our TV stand and hold a few more TV shows/miniseries. (Yes, that's Duck Tales. Ryan loves it. Hahaha.)



So that's how we managed to store hundreds of DVDs in our living room without making it feel like a Blockbuster! (In a few years, kids will be born and they won't know what a Blockbuster is...crazy! Or is that already happening now?)


Since we're talking DVD storage, I thought I'd share a few inspiring photos! Like I said, the system I'm using now works pretty well, but eventually when we buy our own home and customize it a little, I might want to implement storage solutions like these!


I definitely want built-ins surrounding our television in our future home, and these pull-out shelves flanking the TV are a great idea!

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There's tons of media storage in this awesome home theatre room! I think I'd rather have books on those upper shelves, but I do love the pull-out underbed drawers!

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These binders (labeled by genre) might work for our TV-on-DVD if I ever decide to nix their cases:

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Jen from iHeartOrganizing has a great system--I love the colorful storage!

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Got an DVD storage solutions to share? Leave 'em in the comments!