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downsizing
| ...from 75 to 25 meters |
01 | Introduction
Because a move was in the air, I spent some months downsizing my collection from 90 meters (in cobbled-together IKEA furniture) to about 70 meters.
That's how far down in size I could go by selling things I didn't want anymore, streamlining the collection by removing doubles and by getting rid of some boxes which were bigger than what they were holding.
When I finally found exactly the apartment I was looking for, I was faced with reducing everything I had down to a 3.5 meter wall, which was the maximum space I would be able to use for the collection.
That meant that I would need to fit the content of 15 IKEA "Benno" shelves and altogether 38 meters of IKEA "Ivar" shelf space into a single collection wall that, for starters, I would buy from IKEA (16 new IKEA "Gnedby" shelves in white).
And, yes, I decided to keep my collection instead of going digital, simply because I had invested a lot of lifeblood into assembling what I had and because a lot of it still isn't available digitally.
02 | SlimDisc
After much deliberation, I decided to go with SlimDisc, a British company that specializes in space-saving CD and DVD sleeves that aren't cheap but, as my experience these past months has shown, are of extremly durable quality and just a well-designed product.
The jewel cases went into the trash and slipcases, carboard boxes and most digipaks were packed away into moving boxes.
03 | CD Dividers
Because once removed from their jewel cases the CD's spines are difficult or impossible to read, and because all the drawer cabinet solutions on the market were well beyond my financial reach or simply didn't fit my repackaged collection, for starters, I decided to go with Vinyl Guru's CD Collection Dividers, which were the only ones I found online that seemed to have (and now that I have 600 of them, do have) the sturdy quality I was looking for.
The labeling of those dividers I did with a Brother P-touch D600VP, always waiting to handle the job.
04 | Success!
In the end, my entire collection now fits into the shelves you see above. Usually, those shelves have 12 compartments, but I reduced them to 10 each so I can clean the shelves properly.
Doing that meant that the shelf had to grow by three entire units, but because I had the space, I decided to opt for that solution.
Besides that, should the collecting bug bite me again, I still have space for a minimum of 2000 CDs, probably a lot more.
P.S.: In case you are wondering, the above shelf holds nearly 10000 CDs at the moment.
05 | Today, after another move
Well, this is what my collection looks like at the moment. Because I suddenly have more space again, I reintegrated "digipaks", "longboxes", special edition packaging and various box sets. Because I have removed rows from each unit to make the whole shelf easier to clean, potentially, I still have space for a minimum of 2000 CDs. [Not pictured: a second wall with most of my classical collection.]
Click | for larger image
