Organizing DVDs on the Cheap

I used to organize my DVDs in binders. While that was a great idea, over the years the binders got so full that I needed to purchase more and more of them.  So, when I couldn't find them any longer, I decided I needed a system that would work without using so much space. The image below is the way we were organizing DVDs in our home.

Keep in mind, when organizing DVDs on the cheap, you need to be creative. I purchased these items from the office supplies store and found the bins at Target.  Here's how I created this system.

An Easy Way to Organize DVDs

These are my binders for my family's DVD collection. Each family member had their own binder with their beloved movies in it. Since the kids would pull from their binder often, they needed their own binder so they could place it in their room and the other child wouldn't have to hunt for their DVDs. I developed this system about five years ago and while this system worked for some time, the issues were:

• The children are teens now, and their movie interests are pretty much the same as ours.
• The binders were full, and we needed to add more binders which was expensive and wasn't easy to find any more.
• We wanted to find movies by name and not by the person who owned it.

Use Paper DVD sleeves

So, I decided to gather all the movies together and put them in ABC order by Title. It took about 2 hours placing the DVDs in the paper sleeves and sorting them by title.

Make Labels for the movies

Then, about an hour or so making sure they were in the right place and creating labels for each paper sleeve. I used the Avery return address labels that hold 80 labels per page. To make this quickly move along, I had my daughter read the titles to me while I typed them on the label. And, with my lightning fast typing, we were able to transfer them onto the labels fairly quickly.

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 Use ABC labels

After these labels were printed, I bought Alphabet Avery tabs and 100 pack paper DVD Sleeves from Staples. (Affiliate: You can click on the link and order them from Amazon.) They just didn't have one with a # sign on it for the movies that start with a number, so I had to create it myself.

The most difficult thing in this process was finding bins that were affordable. After going to three major discount chains, I finally found something at Target that worked for the 275 DVD that we had in our collection.

The result!

And, here is the result. So, we knew what movies we had, I decided to copy the list and added it to a family page in OneNote.  I then printed it out and placed it near the DVDs just in case someone what's to know if we had a movie.

The total cost = $57.94 =$4.99 Tabs + $6.99 x 2 for bins + 12.99 Sleeves x 3 +$0.00 for return labels I already had.

UPDATE:

We have used this system for at least 5 years now and it still works.  Woohoo!  So happy we found a way to organized our mass collection of DVDs. Good luck on your DVD organization.  Leave a comment below and let me know how you organize your DVDs.  I would love to hear from you.