A Million Little Pieces Of My Mind

Visitors to our new house have been very kind not to look askance at the boxes of DVDs we have had stacked in our family room. I've been collecting DVDs for years, but of course such a collection is only useful if the DVDs in it can be easily accessed at will. In our old house, we had simply stored them alphabetically in a couple of bookcases. But I had a better solution in mind for the new house.

The bookcase solution wasn't optimal for a couple of reasons.

• Bookcase shelves are about twice the depth needed for DVD cases, resulting in wasted space.
• In the new house we used all the bookcases elsewhere, leaving none for DVDs.

So I hunted online and found exactly what I wanted at Store Your Media. Being a trusting sort, I ordered the unit for $379.95, a price that includes shipping (and of course there's no tax on online purchases). They said it would arrive in 10 business days but in fact it arrived just five calendar days from when I ordered it! So that was a good sign.

I had to assemble it, of course. And I've assembled a lot of furniture through the years. This unit is large and heavy, so there was plenty of physical labor and dripping sweat involved in putting it together. However, the instructions were very simple and easy to follow; all the parts were there; and it only took me about 90 minutes to put together, not including actually loading the shelves, which Zach and Jenny did for me.

We had moved the DVD boxes into the living room, since they were stacked where the unit was to go. Now that the unit was up, Jenny, Zach and I did a quick first-level sort of the DVDs and I loaded the shelves. Jenny donated a plant to put on top of the unit and I filled the rest with family photos.

And here's the result:

To provide better context, here's a panoramic view showing the bookcase in relation to the TV and the rest of the family room/home theatre.

Now, when I posted the picture of the bookshelf on Facebook, my friend Steve said, "That's still so 20th century - all our DVDs are on a 4 terabyte hard disk."

To which I replied, "Yes, but when people look at your hard disk, do they gasp, 'Oh my God, you have so many movies!'?"

Besides, I'm not at all sure this many DVDs would fit on a 4-terabyte hard disk.

In any case, I no longer collect DVDs as I once did. Netflix makes it too easy to simply rent anything I want to see, with only a day or so lead time. And a lot of their movies can be viewed instantly. So I'll only be buying movies I feel really special about. Like, I'll definitely buy Avatar when it comes out.

Tomorrow: I'll be picking up the drapes from the dry cleaners and we'll be putting them up. Then the family room will be done!—At least, until I get a new plasma HDTV.