DVD's, Shelves and Pantries

Last year I came across a Lifehacker link to this series of pictures on Flickr. A fellow called Barelyfitz, had saved a lot of space for his DVD collection by storing each DVD in an individual slip cover. He also cut the front and back cover of the DVD wrap to be able to ID the DVD's without the colourful print jobs.

The wife and I thought it was a good idea and got around to starting our project last night. However, we first went through our DVD collection and pruned it. We ended up pulling 56 DVD's that we decided that we didn't want to keep and after work we took them to The Beat Goes On and sold them. We ended getting $121.00 for them which we thought wasn't too bad.

On the drive home I realized that we should of looked into selling them on Ebay, we might of made more money. The store paid us $7 for the copy of Beastmaster, so it would of definitely made more on Ebay!

We live in a 2 bedroom apartment and space is at a premium. We have some space intensive hobbies as well. One of the things that has really surprised us since we started living on a budget and being more organized with our shopping is that we are running out of cupboard space in the kitchen!

O.K. It's not a big kitchen, but right now there's three jars of peanut butter, 3 jars of spaghetti sauce and a can of creamed corn all sitting on the counter because we can't find a place to cram it into. So we had a plan. Once we repackaged the DVD's, (which looks like it will fill about 3 shoeboxes now), we would use the spot by the kitchen door that currently has 4 DVD shelves, to hold a stand alone pantry.

After selling the DVD's we headed over to Canadian Tire and picked up the pantry and pocketed the extra $30. We'll add that to the money we've saved to buy an new dresser for the bedroom when we go to Ikea on Saturday. IKEEEEEAAAAaaaaaa. A little piece at a time we're getting rid of the old crap in the bedroom.

I know that some people would say that we shouldn't be spending money on stuff like furniture when we could be paying down debt, but we are working for a balance that leaves us happy with our surroundings as well as our finances. If we hadn't sold the DVD's to pay for the pantry, the Ikea money would have paid for it and the spending at Ikea wouldn't of happened until we saved up the difference. We would have still ended up going to Ikea, because our daughter needs a ride so she can buy a bed for our granddaughter.

As for the DVD shelves (from Ikea), we'll give one to our daughter and we have friends who would like to buy a couple from us.

It's all working out quite well!