Here's how we did it. First I organized all the movies. This project has been in progress for a couple of weeks. As we have been repainting our basement, I decided to switch my movies and my books. I had half the books in our built-in bookshelf downstairs and half in a freestanding bookcase in my guest room and the same thing with the movies - half in the basement and half upstairs. So I decided to switch them and get them all in the same place, so it would make more sense. Here is the final result:
I sorted out all the movies by category and labeled each shelf to help keep them organized. There are chick flicks, kids movies, westerns (my husband has a whole shelf!), action movies, comedies, and dramas. As I was doing this, I sorted out all of our old home movies and put them in a special place where they would be extra safe and I also weeded out a large box of VHS movies that were either duplicates, or ones we had taped off of TV. I made a list of those movies so we can work on buying them on DVD a few at a time. I wish I'd thought to take a before picture, but believe me, it didn't look all nice & neat like this. Movies were stacked up all haphazard and messy taking up a lot more room.Here is the final result on the bookshelves:
Again, a great improvement, though I didn't really get rid of very many books. I had already decluttered two big boxes of them before we moved into this house two years ago.
While I was putting all the movies in order, I had my son bring up his whole toy box, one drawer at a time. Now that he's 10 and very into video games and computers, he doesn't play much with toys any more. So I asked him to pick out 5 or 10 toys out of each drawer that he really wanted to keep and the rest of them went into the giveaway box. Fortunately, he's always very good natured about this and doesn't seem to mind giving away toys as long as he can keep his favorites. In fact, I think he's a little relieved to have a bit less to deal with. So, that added 2 more big boxes to the truckload.
Then our DVD player broke. I know perfectly well that we wouldn't ever get around to getting it fixed, so I just had my husband borrow the one from our basement TV for upstairs and put the old one in the truck. We have a Tivo downstairs so we rarely watch DVD's down there anyway and that's just one less piece of hardware to deal with. And I'm sure someone can take the time to fix it up.
This afternoon, I spent a couple of hours helping my youngest son organize his room. His dresser was a complete mess. Every drawer was filled to the brim with a haphazard collection of clothes with no rhyme or reason.
So we took everything out of the drawers and his closet (scary!). I sorted everything by type of clothing and size so I could see what fit and what didn't and how much we had of each type of clothing. Then I was able to determine how many drawers I needed to allocate to pants, shirts, sweatshirts, etc. In order to help him keep more organized in the future, I took my handy-dandy label maker and neatly labeled each drawer so he will know exactly where to put his clothes away and where to find clothes when he wants them. I was surprised at how many really nice items of clothing he had that were going unworn because they were hiding around at the bottom of a drawer under a stack of outgrown clothing.
That little exercise netted us a large bag of trash, plus a large box full of nice outgrown clothes and shoes. I'm sure a homeless shelter or other charity will definitely appreciate them. It was a lot of work, but it does feel so nice to have all our books, movies, toys, and kids clothing so nice and organized.
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