Give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread - Proverbs 30:8

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Boot Camp - Day 2

Music

According to Tanja, decluttering music is supposed to be fun.....

For me, I feel like this was a particularly hard place to start. Music is HUGE part of our lives so we have a pretty big music collection. I really don't want to part with the majority of it (plus at least half of it is not mine). I pulled out the following boxes of cds and decided if I could consolidate these into two boxes instead of three, I would be happy.

Here is BEFORE

and this is AFTER


You can see from the box on the left that we have already eliminated all the jewel cases. We did this several years ago when we were tight on space. In addition to all these cds, we also have two full "books" of cds. One holds the kids' music and the cds I use for music class. The other holds more of Kevin's collection. Yes...we have most of these on our ipod, but we are hanging on the original cds in case our digital collection gets lost or erased.

The cds on the right side are my classical and violin collection. This is where I spent my energy decluttering. I have held on to many of the pieces "just in case". I realized that if I really need a piece for a class I am teaching, I can get it at the library.

I threw out the jewel cases for my teaching cds and put them together in this extra book I had.

And here is a picture of the cds that didn't make the cut (plus the 23 jewel cases I threw away!)

8 comments:

  1. We've always kept our movies and music in large books and thrown away the cases! :)

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  2. I hesitate to do this with all our cds because I'm always thinking about possibly getting rid of it. Now that I typed that out, I realize how weird it sounds! I have several kids cds that I'm sure my kids will eventually outgrow (since kids grow up), but I've kept the cases so I can donate them or give them to someone else. I think I need to get over that and live fully in the present (which doesn't include storing things for something that might happen in 7 years).

    I think I might go buy a few more books and do this - it would free up tons of storage space and allow me to keep all the cds by the stereo. Right now they are in a closet upstairs.

    Way to make me think through this even more!!!

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  3. Impressive!! I can see how much harder this would be if music is something you are teaching!! Wow!!!

    And, you set the goal of 2 boxes and you did it!! That kind of goal setting is really helping me for sure!! It totally gets me motivated to meet my target and challenge myself...it's kinda fun---usually!! lol!!! :)

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  4. Jill,

    Music was soooo hard for me. I did it in three big decluttering sessions spread out over a couple of years.

    The last big declutter was just a few months ago and it literally brought me to my knees! It took me a month to do it.

    Just like you I had a huge collection. It's still pretty large but I tried to downsize the stuff that I never, ever listened to anymore.

    Lucky for you every day of boot camp has music in it, so you can pull out your tunes and enjoy them even if you don't declutter further!

    About the donation thing/individual cd case thing. I put all of mine in big cd cases a few years back. With this big declutter I was able to donate my largest case and it was full of cd's! Whoever bought it from the thrift shop was (I'm sure) delighted to get all of them.

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  5. Jill,
    I have converted my entire collection to mp3 and have it on a desktop in our home. I also have begun the tedious process of scanning our filing cabinet to the same PC. (I have a 2TB drive attached for backup that I split between my photo business and personal backup). My wife and I both have laptops and we've set them to use the wifi and backup to the same disk. Here's why: My fear is not that I'll lose one item but that in the event of a catastrophe I want to be able to rebuild (digitally). So what I've done is buy a $5 per month online backup with www.mozy.com and it takes care of all the data. If we lose everything all I have to do is visit mozy.com and login to start getting my life back. Music, kids pictures, scans of taxes, scans of kids art, backups of all my photo business info and photo sessions, complete images of laptop drives, etc.
    Just food for thought! You never can be too prepared!
    -Kevin

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  6. Thanks for this tip and info, Kevin....I'll look into it.

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  7. I know I'm late to the party but I hope you actually recycled the CD cases instead of "throwing them out." :)

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