Hyper-Organization

Maybe there's something about moving-in to a new place that makes one feel the need to be hyper-organized.

I suppose it all starts before the move. You realize how much crap you have and go into heavy-duty purge-mode. You sort through boxes and boxes of stuff that you've had stored wasy in the attic or basement, and realize, "Hey. I haven't used any of this for the past 2 years since I moved here." Which is the sure-sign, of course. purge Donate it. Give it away. get rid of it.

When you move into your new space, it's like a once-in-a-lifetime-chance to organize all of your stuff: do it now, before you've been there too long, you fall into a different pattern, and it simply becomes too late to organize.

So, that's where we are. Let's organize everything NOW, so it'll be DONE!

Our best example or this is the media closet in the TV room. We built a shelf in there to hold all of the TV/Music components: the Media PC, the receiver, the VCR (because I still like to watch an old old guard tape now and then) and the internet hub. It all fits really nicely on the shelf. We put up a smaller shelf on the side wall that holds the Xbox console. Above the Xbox, we installed little hooks on the bottom of the big shelf to hang the Xbox controllers. (see where this is all going?) On Saturday, we took a trip to The Container Store to buy a shelving system for all of our DVDs and Xbox games. I really love the elpha shelving system that they have there. In Dick's old house, we built an entire closet system out of it. But I digress....

The shelving system worked like a charm. I'm very pleased. We have all of the Xbox games on the top shelf (yes, we have a lot), and another 2 1/2 shelves filled with our DVDs. Plenty of room to grow...

Today, we went to Target and bought CD storage binders for our CD collections. We figured this would be a good solution to decreasing the amount of space needed for all of our CDs. This makes even more sense when you factor in the fact that we've already "ripped" most of our CDs onto our computers, so we won't need to access the actual CDs very often.

Turns out I have approx 150 CDs. It's a good amount, but nowhere near the size of most of my friend's music collections. I was able to fit all of my CDs into less than 1 1/2 binders. (We bought the kind that can hold the CD as well as the cover art, so it takes up twice the space.) Dick bought another 5 binders for his music - I think he has somewhere near 500 CDs, plus he's organizing them by category. Anyhow, all of this organization means we can store all of this stuff in significantly less space than it used to take. In fact, all of our CD binders can fit on one shelf in the media closet.

We have hundreds of empty jewel cases now that we'll be recycling. Anyone need any? I've already packed a bunch to give my my Mom and Sister. I'm also keeping some for future CD-burning projects.

I LOVE being organized. The closet is just so cool!