It's September and your apartment has been neglected all summer. Now you want to get your apartment in shape by the end of the month. What are you going to do? The following are our suggestions for small but powerful things you can do in the next three weeks. Choose one, a few or stretch for all of them and add your own. Deadline: Monday, October 2.
- Cleaning
- Clean out your fridge
- Wipe down & vacuum entire apartment, including behind and under large objects
- Wash all your bedding, flip your mattress, vacuum and dust around bed
- Fix one thing that has long been broken
- Decluttering
- Sort & giveaway 25% contents of three closets
- Sort & giveaway 25% contest of book or CD or DVD collection
- Establish "front hall" landing strip and move all mail, bills, keys, wallets, cell phones, etc to that area after sorting carefully
- Renewing
- Buy fresh flowers for your apartment (office too)
- Buy a cozy, new set of sheets for the colder months ahead
- Replace one element of your home that you consider drab and old, with something new, colorful and exciting.
Being a movie collector I can't help but shudder at the though of giving away DVDs. But being a NYC dweller I know media collections can take up a ton of space.
I think more city dwellers should consider media servers. You can store a ton of CDs, and even DVDs on very small computers. Consider that for $700 you can get a fully loaded Mac Mini with enough space for hundreds of CDs and more than a few movies. Tack on a very small harddrive, and you can store another 50 or so movies (and so on and so on).
Seems like a small price to pay in order to reclaim some square footage.
All those CDs and DVDs can then be put in storage (if you want to stay strictly legal). Of course I have heard about people giving away/selling media after transfering the contents....
Those big 330 CD/DVD wallet/albums greatly reduce the volume required for CD/DVD collections while organizing them. Spindles provide even denser storage.
To paraphrase Joe Hill:
Don't toss, organize!
After ripping to mp3, put CD's in the little white sleeves like software comes in. Take the liner notes out of the package as well. Those can both be stored in a small box in storage. Take the rest of the CD packaging, remove the rest of the album details (usually one sheet under the thing that the cd snaps into) and donate that to Goodwill. I did this to my >400 CD collection and saved about 80% in space.
Vacuum first, then dust. If things are really dusty, use the attachment with the brush end to vacuum dust from tops of books, CDs, DVDs, etc. This also works great on shelves that don't hold a lot of small, light objects.
dtj -
Why, why, why are you hauling empty, old, scratched up cd cases to Goodwill?
Excellent tips! I'm like the women on Oprah when it comes to clearing up my stuffs. I still have jeans from 10 years ago when my waist was 27.
As for Cd cases, I actually saw people try to sell their empty cd cases to Cash Converters.
If you have a lot of scratched up cds that you would just throw way-- why not RECYCLE them. GreenDisk www.greendisk.com recyles CDs, diskettes, DVDs, ink cartridges etc.
I bought a "Technotrash" can for our office ($30, they send empty to you and price includes shipping back full) and it makes me feel better about all the media trash we would otherwise dump in a landfill.