Dan has already purged down his game collection over the years. It's already well organized and at this point, anything we still have is more or less "curated". Decisions about previous generation consoles may have to be made, but not at the moment.
DVDs and BluRays are a different beast. We have so many DVDs that we will never watch again, but it's a matter of sorting out the "keep" from the "toss," and agreeing on it among ourselves. Honestly, most of what we watch is streamed on Netflix, so dragging out individual discs to be placed in a device one by one seems cumbersome by comparison.
There is also the issue of Sam. In the past, he's messed with our DVDs so much that we had to set some aside in bins because he was literally ruining them: ripping the cases apart, destroying covers, scratching the discs beyond recognition, etc. That behavior seems to have slowed down, but we can't be sure that it's not just a lack of access thing. We moved our DVD player to the bedroom, since we can (and do) just play DVDs on the PS3 in the basement, and Sam has been messing with that, opening and closing the tray over and over. On the other hand, the DVD player in the minivan means that Sam is the one of us most likely to watch a physical copy of a DVD on any particular day. We keep a small stock of them (discs only) in the van.
So. Part of this feels futile and pointless. Even though it was step 6, I didn't even take "before" pictures until the 8th. Even though I knew I'd feel much better about it once it was done. Here we go:
Before: Most of it. Left 2.5 shelves are video games; the rest are DVDs and BluRays
Before: Random box of DVDs, possibly from a previous purge?
Before: Random tote of DVDs, stowed away at the height of Sam's carnage (not pictured: another bin the same size, full, that Dan found when I thought I was 90% finished)
Before: More video games, in the bedroom
Before: Even more video games, and a couple of DVDs, in the office
Since I knew how badly Sam had messed things up with the DVDs, I first went through and tried to see if all the discs were in their correct cases. This was especially important for the DVD movies and some of the television shows...he'd really made a huge mess of things. I had loose cases, loose inserts, and loose discs. In the end, I didn't find everything, since some had obviously been damaged badly enough to have been thrown away. There is a reason that the shelves Sam could reach by climbing on the couch were empty for a time, and the things put up high were the things we wanted to keep nice, for example, the newer BluRays and some of the anime.
Then I went to work on the bin and later the box. Most of what was in there were individual movies, and for the time, I didn't bother to sort by genre or alphabetize them. My categories were anime, animated TV, TV shows, and movies.
Once all of what we had was visible, I went through and removed my "keepers" from the shelves (aside from the games and BluRays, which are staying put.) It only filled the banker's box. I was actually really close to finished with "my portion" of the purge by the end of the day on the 8th. Unfortunately, I needed Dan to weigh in on the rest of it.
I also needed to figure out how to handle the DS and 3DS games, which were in the bedroom and office. We had plans to purchase a taller, narrower bookshelf from IKEA to replace the bedroom bookshelf which was just too short to keep Sam out of. I decided that for the meantime, they would have to stay in the office, and since I'd already decluttered the books, I had upwards of two shelves to spare. [Last minute edit: I bought the bookcase this morning, but it's still not put together. Look for it in my "master bedroom" declutter post sometime in the next couple of weeks.]
Eventually I got Dan to take a look at what he wanted to keep. He was sure we still had more DVDs somewhere, and lo and behold, there was an entire bin that I didn't know about. So I sort of had to start over. When we finalized our "to keep" list, I organized what we had and labeled the shelves. It turned out to look like more on the shelves than there were before (for good reason; we actually have our movies out again!), but the stuff we got rid of filled an entire tote full plus that banker's box. So here's "after"!
After: tada!
I mostly just organized the four shelves to the right in the picture. Top row: BluRay Movies (2 shelves), BluRay Anime, and BluRay TV (with room to grow our collection.) Second row: DVD Anime (4 shelves). Third Row: DVD TV (4 shelves bleeding into the shelf of PS1 games to the left), Fourth and Bottom Rows: DVD Movies (6 shelves). I just noticed that I accidentally cut off the shelf to the far left, but it's just the same as it was. I may make labels for the game shelves at some point, too, but for now, they are self-explanatory.
Whew. Onward! #LWSLClutterFree
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