An Organizing Question
Josh and I have a lot of music. Some is stashed under our bed (the seasonal and not as often listened too stuff). Some are in a CD organizer in our bedroom, some are in a huge CD organizer in our living room, taking up floor space (I’d like to get rid of that thing, as it takes up floor space, gathers dust, and is rather ugly). Some are stashed in albums or in our vehicles.
I’m on a mission to organize our CDs. I want them to be organized by genre and easily accessible, although possibly out of sight and able to be dust free. One possibility is storing everything in albums. That’s nice because then you can grab them and go. The only thing is what do you do with all the jewel cases? I don’t want to toss them, so then you have to store them somewhere else. Anyone have any ideas or great resources? Thanks!
Hey Danielle. A few years ago I bought a huge album from walmart and organized the cds alphabetically. I did throw away the jewel cases, but the inserts fit nicely in the albums as well. I just put the cd behind the insert, so I still get to see the cd covers, makes them easier to find too. Just an idea.
This is nothing original… but a couple months ago, I was on the same mission, and found some nice sturdy cardboard cd boxes at Ikea. They have them in black, red, sage green and white. $5.99 for a pack of 2. Each box holds about 24 cds if you store them spine up (which makes for easy selection) It’s a clean, cohesive look. It’s also nice, because there are label holders on the front. I broke them down by category (CCM, Jazz, Soundtracks, etc) and have a box or two for each. I like that I have the freedom to add new cds to my “system” without having to rearrange everything. wow, sorry this turned into such a lengthy comment!
Here’s what I’m talking about:
http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/00115459
Great ideas, guys! Actually, I really love the sage gree organizers. Since I really wanted to keep the jewel cases, I think we’re going to go with your approach, Megan. Thanks so much! I hadn’t seen these organizers before. Actually, I think my husband is going to go and buy a few before he comes home. Thanks!
I was thinking about your cd stack when I was over on Friday. I thought, yeah, I used to have 2 of those standing cd racks in my living room plus stacks in the “office”. We set up at LAN, as you may remember, so one of our computers houses only music 40GBs of music! All of our music is burned to that hard drive, but we kept the cds. We made a spreadsheet and began typing cd’s, title, artist, and genre. It’s more fun and faster if someone reads and someone types. Then, we sorted them in the spreadsheet by genre. We bought several of the albums someone else mentioned and we have a “Table of Contents” in the beginning of each. We used thespreadsheet list to make the TOC and to store the cds by genre. Groups or genre’s we thought we’d buy more of, we left spaces for. We have volumes 1, 2 and 3. Also, I made labels using the spreadsheet, so each spot is marked with which cd goes there, so putting them back is easier. We kept the cool inserts or inserts with lyrics and they’re in a drawer in the office. You can recycle jewel cases and that’s what we did
It takes a long time and now that it’s done, it’s a nice system 
Love, R-
We have our CDs in a bin in storage because we ripped them and play them on our computers or our sound system downstairs; this lets us organize by genre in folders.
I use the double photo boxes from Exposures. They are pretty on shelves and very strong…you can stand on them and they hold a ton. Plus you can label the front. Doesn’t look like they offer the double one in many colors any more but they do have one specific for CD’s that is smaller.
We have a ton of CDs, so organizing them has been a huge problem for us. I finally decided to buy a couple of those 5 drawer storage containers. I have them set up in the basement and keep all of our CDs in them. My plan is to alphabetize them in the drawers so we can easily find what we are looking for, just haven’t had time yet. Although, like Dena, we have all of our favorites on our MP3 player (an apple computer) that’s hooked up to our TV and stereo. So we can easily access them anytime and create our own playlists. It works great!