Organizing Our Entertainment

We're pretty lucky to have lots of built-in storage in our living room and even down our hallway, but we haven't utilized the space very well. For one, we have hundreds of DVDs. How often do we watch any of these? Rarely. Mostly we watch one of our many TV show series or movies on Netflix. I'm debating whether or not we even need to keep them all... Secondly, it's become a catch-all for miscellaneous crap.

So what's the setup? Well, there is a built-in on either side of our fireplace in the living room. On the left is where we keep those useless DVDs. I purged them a few weeks ago with B and tossed quite a few that I have maybe watched once since purchasing, and we alphabetized the rest of them.

Above is the cupboard in all it's DVD-liciousness. 

See, all alphabetical...I even took a close up for you :)

To the side there's a small cupboard that is triangular and not very big. I don't know what someone thought would fit on these shelves, but I managed to arrange our TV series on them.

One of these days I'm going to find a better way to store them. But, since we're just renting right now and I don't know what our future home has in "storage" {hardy-har-har} for us quite yet, I'm going to hold off on that until we're ready to move. I have a few ideas bouncing around in my brain from different blogs and {of course} Pinterest so once the time comes I'll be able to make the upgrade pretty quickly.

On the left side we have our cable box, Wii, DVD player, and sound system hidden. All except the Wii were here when we moved in so I haven't messed with hiding the cables much. {It stinks renting - everything is temporary!} Above that storage cupboard, we had some miscellaneous crap. See below.

Told you. 

Well, I finally got tired of the mess and invested in a few baskets from Michaels as well as dug up a photo box that wasn't in use. After some slight rearranging with the shelves, I ended up with this:

This makes me so happy! {I did tidy up the cupboard below and put everything in its place, but didn't see the need to take a picture since the setup remained the same.}

On the lower shelf two baskets hold our Wii accessories and our remotes:

Go up a shelf and find our "fun" basket that never gets used...it holds our smaller games while the bigger ones sit on the right of it:

The next shelf up holds some of our fitness accessories:

Fitness Ball air pump, stretch bands, ankle weights, the jump rope, ad some of the manuals/guides that came with those items. My workout DVDs fit perfectly into that photo box I mentioned wasn't in use!

The part of this storage organization that made me most excited was finally having a place to store my scrapbooks! I work so hard on them but many of the shelves aren't deep enough for the 12x12 albums, so they basically sat in my office/craft room piled up and a hassle to pull out to look at. However, the depth of these side cupboards was perfect and once I moved the shelves around a bit I had space for them vertically too!

Rockin'!

Now one final look, before & after:

 

Total cost? Aside from the time alphabetizing the DVDs and elbow grease to move the shelves, the baskets came to a grand total of $8.56 {they were on sale plus I had coupons off my total purchase}! Can I get a "woot woot"?!

-KK