Brandon and I are still weighing our options for CD and DVD storage, but we think we’ve settled on the perfect solution for us. Thank you for all of your suggestions and advice!

As I had mentioned, we’re not ready to go 100% digital. We’re probably about 40% there… Brandon has 34 GB of music on his computer, and I have another 22GB on mine. We do have most of the music we currently listen to on our computers, but we still play CDs all the time. And Brandon is a movie person. I think I have 10 or 15 DVDs, but Brandon has about 700. PLUS video games. Here’s where they’re all stored:

Those are Billy bookcases with doors in Brandon’s office, but we’ve filled them to capacity. Overfilled them, actually. And we don’t have any more room in our house for additional storage… unless we can use the dead space under the stairs leading to the second floor. The room looked like this when we moved in:

We just lined up the bookcases to block that big open space. If we got a couple of media cabinets from Can-Am though, I think we could install them so they seem built-in.

Brandon and I are both crazy about the way Rearranged Design stored their CDs. If we get the same CD sleeves and these DVD sleeves, we could fit everything into one tidy space. The only problem? This will not be an inexpensive undertaking. BUT…

• The CD sleeves show the spine of each CD insert, so they’re still browsable.
• The DVD sleeves hold the covers without cutting or folding them, and they hold two discs.
• This setup would solve our storage problem and we’d still have room to grow.
• Alphabetization would be easier to maintain with sleeves than with a binder.
• Taking out a few CDs at a time with their corresponding sleeves seems easier than grabbing a bunch of loose discs from several different binders.
• The cabinets have a safety feature to prevent toppling by only allowing one drawer to be pulled out at a time. Brandon was almost crushed by a filing cabinet once, so he’s all too familiar with the danger. We will soon have a curious toddler, so this feature is a big plus for us.
• The drawers can be locked. Again, with a curious toddler on the way this is another big plus.
• We could FREE UP SOME SPACE in the rest of the house.

Now we’re just trying to decide if we want to tackle this whole project at once, or if we should do it in phases. We could start with the CDs first, storing them in boxes that we already have. And when we move on to the DVDs (and outgrow the boxes), we could find an affordable dresser instead of the cabinets to save money. Or do we just spring for it all now? It’s a little crazy, but it would be so nice after it’s finished.