Tired of DVD clutter in your living room? This simple and creative solution is the answer. It’s a space saving DVD storage ideas that REALLY works. A compact and stylish way to store DVDs in your home from now on.
We are BIG film and TV series watchers in our house – and as such, over the years we’ve collected a fair few DVDs.
In fact – when I counted them up, there were well over 100!
Some were bought in charity shops, others from Amazon, and others were presents – but they’ve soon mounted up.
(Even though now we do buy a lot of films digitally instead, a lot of the DVDs we’ve got are classics we really want to keep).
We didn’t really notice how many there were, because we had room to store them – but a few things over the past couple of months have niggled me – so it was time to find a new solution, and I’m so pleased with the results.
It’s a quick project that’s truly space saving – so it makes my organising heart happy on so many levels.
I can’t wait to show you, so let’s go, shall we….
The Previous DVD Storage Solution
We’d got a pretty good solution already, in that there’s a storage coffee table in the centre of the living room that was big enough (just!) for all the DVDs collected over the years.
But there were a few issues that meant it stopped working as well as I wanted it to – and because organising is never done (always changing!) – I wanted to find a solution that worked better.
The issues we had with the current DVD storage were: –
- It was almost full – so when we wanted to look for a DVD to watch, loads had to be taken out to see what we had.
- We wanted to free up some storage space for board games (I was moving other things around the house, and the living room was the room we played the most games in, so it made sense to try and find room there)
- There had started to be a few piles left out of DVDs on the DVD player – which were annoying me as they looked messy.
I knew we weren’t using the TV unit to it’s best, so I wanted to look at ways to make the space here work harder.
The height of the space available wasn’t being used at all, which was the first thing I decided to rectify.
Making Space For the DVD Storage
Our TV unit is actually a coffee table!
I am a big fan of getting the right dimensions for a space, whether it be the right type of furniture or not, and with the low window behind the TV and the width of the unit dictated by the wall and the fireplace, the coffee table that I found was ideal.
Related: Using Chests of Drawers For Bedside Tables – Why it Works So Well!
But, because it wasn’t an actual TV unit, there were no shelves to maximise the space inside for adding more than one tech unit.
This was fine for a while, as we only had two units and they fit side by side. But the excess space above meant that the wires could be seen when we were sitting on the sofa, and there was space for DVD clutter to start to pile up…
As such – I decided that the first step to solving this issue was to get a shelf!
In a similar way to getting extra shelf units for Kitchen Cabinets – I set about looking for something that would work in the space we had.
I picked black because it would blend with the tech units, and would also not be as obvious when in place (as the furniture itself was what we wanted to see rather than the shelf).
For it to be wide enough, I ended up with a computer riser – and it worked perfectly!
TIP – Don’t just check the width if you’re looking to maximise height in any unit. You need to ensure that the height of the shelf will fit, and include the item you will be putting on top into your calculations as well. A lot of the shelves that I initially found would have been too high when the DVD player was added on top.
Sorting Out The DVDs
The solution for the TV unit meant that there was no space for some (maybe all?) DVDs to be stored in there – which was an exciting prospect, because this made the most sense to me, being right by the TV.
First things first therefore – and that was to declutter the collection.
Knowing what we REALLY wanted to keep meant that we knew the space we needed….
Step One – Get All The DVDs Out
Having everything out in one space made it much quicker to go through them (and see what we had!). I gathered any from the rest of the room that had started piles elsewhere!
Step Two – Go Through Them All And Decide Which To Keep
Tip – Make sure everyone who owns them is there to make declutter decisions – it’s impossible to do any decluttering without whoever owns what you are sorting through, because you can’t make that choice for them.
Step Three – Of The Ones You Aren’t Keeping – Decide What To Do With Them
I used the Ziffit App to scan the barcodes of each DVD and see whether I could sell any of the DVDs for a decent amount.
You can’t get a lot of cash for them, so don’t get your hopes up too high (people aren’t buying them as much as they used to now digital TV has arrived), but a few of the TV series box sets and film totalled around £18. I decided that I’d sell these ones to make some cash back for buying some of the new storage solution we picked.
The rest were put in a pile to be taken to a local charity shop that sells lots of DVDs – so someone else could get joy from them.
Space Saving DVD Storage Solution
So now we had a pile of DVDs that we wanted to keep (still around 100!) – and I started to look for the best solution for the space we wanted to put them.
My criteria was: –
- Space saving
- Easy to find what we needed, when we wanted to watch a film
So I started to look for solutions, and I found the PERFECT THING!
Seriously – I’m so so happy!
Simple, but exactly what I needed to fulfil every requirement.
They are little clear plastic envelopes sized perfectly to add in the DVD paper sleeve from the box (folded in half), and the DVD.
It meant that the boxes could all be got rid of, which would automatically bring down the necessary storage space.
NOTE – Because the items weren’t worth anything when I checked on the Ziffit App, I didn’t mind getting rid of the boxes – so you have to make a decision what would be right for you.
So – I set about taking each DVD out of it’s case and putting it into a sleeve:
And we went from a HUGE pile, to a teeny tiny pile, YES – that’s ALL the DVDs in the storage basket!! (and the excess packaging is left over and can be thrown out).
The best news of all?
That pile would now EASILY fit into the space created by putting the DVD player on top of the Digital TV Box.
NOTE – This basket was actually slightly too high for the space, BUT I knew that it would squash down slightly, so would fit OK. I also thought that this would be sensible because there would be less space for dust to get into the basket, AND we wouldn’t be able to see the DVD sleeves when the basket was in place.
Ways To Organise DVDs Even Further
I’m all for making things as simple as possible, and this solution was perfect for us.
However, if you want to go one step further, you might like to create categories as well. This would be especially useful if you have even more DVDs than we do!
Some categories that you may want to add a tab to section them off, would be: –
- Genre (comedy, thriller, rom com etc…)
- Person (each family member has a section
Another idea would be to file alphabetically.
TIP – The organiser in me likes this option a lot in theory, but in practise it would get messed up so quickly it wouldn’t be worth it (and I always say that an organising system should be easier to put away than it get something out, so having to file alphabetically wouldn’t fit this at all).
There you go – a perfect space saving DVD storage solution
I LOVE this idea, because it would create so much more space for other things in your home, you could have your DVDs accessible and easy to find what you need still, PLUS you’d have much less clutter.
It’s a HUGE win, and I hope you’ve been inspired to try something like this yourself!
Read Next: 5 Fantastic DVD Storage Ideas To Use For Your Collection
