Quick Tip: The EASIEST Way to Organize DVDs

We have about 800 DVDs. And they can all fit neatly into ONE small moving box. My favorite series: "I Love Lucy," "Seinfeld," "The Office." Classic movies I grew up watching: "Ben Hur," "It's a Wonderful Life," "Pride and Prejudice" (the BBC version of course, the definitive; hands down.) If you love movies like we do, maybe you have your own collection. Let me share the most space-efficient way I know to store and organize your disc collections. This solution works for CDs, DVDs, Blu-Rays, and video games!

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I'll share a few photos of how I organized the disks and of course, I'll also share the brands I chose so hopefully you can avoid the annoyance that I went through sorting through the low-quality knock-offs until I finally found quality storage solutions. Okay, here it is, the simplest and most efficient way I know of to keep all our favorite movies and shows in one convenient, organized place - and it costs less that $15! (As of the day I'm posting this.) Scroll down to see!

Remember these days?

Our wi-fi was down for 9 days recently. That means no streaming a.k.a. no instant entertainment for our toddler while we make dinner. It was that week that I remembered why I love DVDs. Not that I every really forgot... I've always loved movies! Some of my favorite memories growing up are of our family sitting down together to watch a VHS from Blockbuster. Picking the movie was such an important decision! It might be the only new content we consumed all week. (Imagine that today!) Our family didn't have cable or watch TV at all for many years, but we always enjoyed movies.

And now faced with over a week without internet, an extensive DVD collection came in handy. Add in my husband's equally impression collection, which I had previously combined (and alphabetized, of course), and we have thousands of hours of entertainment, no internet necessary! Perfect for those offline evenings. In fact, it was refreshing having a break from the constant availability of technology and just choosing one movie per veg sesh to watch, purposefully, instead of aimlessly browsing with no end in sight. Discussing our options felt like the old days; we took our decision seriously and felt like teenagers at the rental store, so much fun! And the necessity to physically get up to insert a new disc caused us to actually FINISH what we were watching before just "clicking away" to something else; what a nice feeling of accomplishment watching an entire movie seemed to be.

Years ago, when our relationship got serious and our DVDs joined hearts and lives, I discarded all the plastic cases and found a much more streamlined way to store the 800 some discs in total. I organize them in binders with special sleeves that hold 8 disks per sheet (4 front, 4 back). You can find all kinds of sizes - some binders hold 400 discs each - and I will share my personal choice for size and brand. However, no matter what brand you go with, we can all agree this is such an easy space-saving solution. Well, it's easy when you're done, haha. Alphabetizing all our movies took me several hours straight. That's worth it to be able to find any movie easily, in my opinion. This system worked for about 5 years until this week.

128-ct DVD holder - this is what I'm using now and they're working great! The perfect size and easy to load! I highly recommend this brand versus others I tried. And this one is so affordable.

This week, one of my old binders started to finally give and gave me cause to reorg the whole collection. As a person who was never diagnosed with OCD but always self-suspected that I have it, I will not lie to you - I did not hate the task. It gave me a chance to check all the alphabetization (and indeed, over the years a few discs were amiss, ah ha!) and I replaced the older binders as necessary. Spoiler alert, they literally don't make them like they used to and I had to choose a new brand. The search began.

For the new binders (I ended up replacing more than one as they were all aging at the same rate and this way they match), I wanted top loading as I find it's just easier to use. I prefer black pages so they matched the case exteriors. I like the slots to be easy to use with thick enough plastic so they don't crumple when I try to insert the disc. I wanted to be able to put a few hundred discs in each case but not TOO many or it just becomes to big and cumbersome and I'll dread hauling it out to use, and if there's one thing I hate, it's an inconvenient system. But I still wanted the wider size so I could view 8 discs at a time (this is nice for series etc.) I went through MULTIPLE binders on Amazon (you know the drill - ordering, returning, ordering, returning, ordering, returning, thanks Prime for your friendly return policy) until I finally found good quality cases that are also a reasonable size. The good news is, you don't have to go through any of this. I'll just tell you what I bought. :)

SIDE NOTE: Honestly, don't bother trying to find any such cases in actual stores anymore. I know because I've looked everywhere you can think of. Everything is digital now and DVD cases, though many exist, are not stocked in physical stores anymore. At best, you'll find a tiny one that only holds a few discs intended for the car. Just save time looking and order online.

Ta-da!!! I'm done with the reorg!

By the way, I used my bestie label maker to easily label the contents of each binder.

You may wonder why I didn't just buy the same binders I had before. Well, I tried. In the past, I used Case Logic and they were great. So of course, I thought I would simply reorder the exact same cases. But to quote several movies, "Thwarted again!" While the new Case Logic cases arrived LOOKING exactly like the old ones, after opening them I immediately realized these were not the same cases. The inside pages were white instead of black and side-loading instead of top-loading. The sheets were thinner and clearly of lesser quality. They were actually 3-ring binders, unlike the old ones that had smooth connectors, so the pages got stuck in the misaligned rings every time I tried to turn the page. AGHH. Further, the slots were too small; discs barely fit inside let alone on both sides. I regret to report that I was desperate to finish the project so I pushed through, uncomfortably stuffing DVDs into awkward cases for hours. Of course, eventually I had to admit defeat; these new cases were not a viable solution. Great, can't wait to order a different brand and do this entire project AGAIN, haha.

So I went back online. I found the Amazon brand had great reviews and also looked a lot like the old Case Logic. I ordered a 400-ct binder. It came a few days later and yes, it was all it was cracked up to be! However, after inserting half the DVDs I came to another conclusion: the binder was simply too big. To be precise, it's 6.5 inches high. Seriously. Great quality but a bit heavy when full. Returned.

However, I did like the materials, so I ordered the Amazon brand again but the smaller version, 128-ct. This would take several more cases, but they would be easier to work with. Further, I realized I could thin out our collection a bit by discarding the "Special Features" discs we had for so many movies; we never actually watch those. Also, I removed all the horror and really scary movies my husband has - that took care of about 50 more discs. I put those in a small, separate case just for him. I don't want our little girl flipping through those anyway; the images alone on the discs themselves startle me! I also have a smaller case for the car with toddler movies, and another small case for Christmas movies. Finally, I also created a new full-sized binder: "Kids & Family Movies." Aww. This one makes me smile. Our little girl changes every aspect of our lives. Now if the internet goes out again, I can let her pick from her own age-appropriate collection. So all in all, I probably removed hundreds of DVDs from the total collection and this enabled me to reorganize the rest in a few binders.

In case you missed it above, here is the full-size binder I prefer.

The new 128-ct binders checked all my boxes and I spent another evening organizing them - while watching a movie, ironically. And NOW my friends, I am happy to report, my movies are better organized than ever AND in affordable binders easily purchased on Amazon! Here is the exact product I used; I recommend this one if you're in the market. In this instance, just save time and trust me on this one, haha!

Here are the smaller binders, perfect for car trips.

Finally, I have a few smaller cases for the car and certain categories of movies so we don't have to flip through everything to get them. Here are the smaller cases I use from Case Logic that so far seem to retain the high quality that historically I expect from that brand (not sure what happened with the larger size). As Amazon brand didn't have that small size, I had to mix and match a bit.

The 32-disc size is perfect for the car or travel DVDs, or perhaps for those music CDs you still have!

Tell me, has anyone else ditched their old plastic DVD cases and only kept the discs? Does anyone want to? I wonder if anyone misses the old plastic cases. I don't, but maybe a more pure-minded movie buff would want the original packaging. I get it, but saving space became more important to me. Tell me your thoughts and share if you end up trying these binders. We just love this system; it works for the whole family!

With Love,

Molly

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