Packrat Media: How I got my books, movies, and music under control

When we undertook the big move, one of the toughest things for us to deal with was our incredible collection of media. My wife and I love to read, listen to music, and watch movies, but years of collecting books, CDs, DVDs and magazines left us with more culture than we could handle. Essentially, most of our rooms were filled with bookshelves, and there were piles of books on almost every flat surface. In fact, many of our paperback books were filed two deep, which meant that we couldn't even get to them without moving several dozen books to a flat surface. Clearly, we needed to do something, or else we were going to end up buried under our favorite reads.

Here's how we cleaned out our mess:

Music

My wife is the big music person in our house, and has a pretty impressive CD collection. Luckily, iTunes, iPods, and mix CDs has made it a lot easier for us to keep our music under control. First off, we decided that there wasn't really isn't that much reason for us to keep all of our mix tapes when we can use iTunes to re-create them with far better sound quality. This cleared out a lot of space and made it possible for us to get rid of our cassette player.