How to Organize Your DVD and Video Shelves in a Media Room

If you have a media room like our family does, all those DVDs and videos can get disorganized in a hurry. One easy way to keep track of your expanding DVD and video library is with a modular shelf system. The advantage of a modular system is that you can expand your DVD storage as your collection of movies grow. With modular systems priced as low as $50 per unit, this is a great way to organize DVDs without spending a lot of money.

When our family only had a few dozen DVDs, organization wasn’t much of a problem. Now that we have over a thousand movie titles and boxed TV sets, keeping them all straight and easy to locate has become a huge challenge. Here are some ways that we keep our movie collection and boxed sets organized.

Don’t hesitate to cull. “Culling” means to weed out and remove the DVDs and videos that your family has outgrown or hasn’t watched in over 5 years. This will free space on the shelves and will make it much easier to find the DVDs that you do watch. So what about saving those old VCRs for grandchildren? Don’t. We discovered that VCRs lose their sound and picture quality after about 15 years. There’s also the problem of outdated technology which will make it tough to view these tapes in the future.

Organize by type. While some people organize their movies by title, I prefer to organize them by genre. Since we have a lot of TV boxed sets, these are given their own special shelves where they will be easy to track. Seasonal movies, romantic comedies, and westerns have their own section too. As far as the rest, they are organized into categories that make sense for our family.

We also group together complete collections such as the Harry Potters series, the Star Wars saga or all 25 James Bond movies so they can be found easier. One last organizing tip is to shelve the more popular genres at eye level where they are easy to find with seasonal movies and boxed TV sets (or lesser watched DVDs) on the bottom shelves.

Reshelf properly. Once the movies are organized, keeping them organized will take some family cooperation. I use a technique borrowed from our local library in which one shelf is left empty just for movies that have been watched and need to be reshelved. This avoids the problem of movies being returned to the wrong location.

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