Currently in the process of organising the den ahead of us (hopefully) relocating to a neat little Cottage. My new den/music room is a bit smaller, so I’m having to be a bit creative about storage and do a bit of soul-searching about what I really need to take with me. It’s long overdue a stock check and I’m enjoying going through what’s there, deciding what stays and releasing the rest back into the wild. I’m aiming to pare down to where I’ve got favourite music and books displayed and being enjoyed rather than boxes and boxes of stuff gathering dust. So, interested to know how Afterworders deal with all your ‘stuff’ and how you decide on your Vinyl/CD crop-rotation etc.
The biggest task is dealing with the about 2,000+ CDs, most of which is on shelves and the rest in crates. Ignoring the fact of it’s plummeting resale value, I had a blast collecting it all and there is stuff in there that isn’t on Spotify etc so I’m keeping a lot of it. I’ll trim down to keep the best stuff shelved but the rest is getting taken out of Jewell cases and filed away in a big flightcase with the booklets & inlay cards that you can flip through easily. Any other views on CD storage?
I’m also interested to know what Vinyl storage people recommend, is Ikea Kallax still the only game in town? What about books? Finally, the weight of stuff – especially Vinyl – how much can you actually put in a room without risking the floor below being buried under an avalanche of Soft Machine LPs?
ATM: What do you do with all this….stuff?
I’m not going to be much help in solving your problem, but I will be interested in what others might suggest because I am in the same position. We recently moved to a smaller place and I have far too many books, CDs and DVDs. I have managed to fill the little store room that comes with the flat and I have a load more boxes of “stuff” in paid-for storage that was meant only to be a temporary measure. As well as having things that I will never get round to reading, listening to or watching, I am now paying for the privilege of hoarding it!
I went to the storage unit the other day with a view to doing a cull on some of the CDs and to take the ones I didn’t want to a charity shop. Do you know how many I ended up taking? Six! I’d open a box, look the CDs and say to myself “keep that one”, “oh, that one’s good”, “I ought to give that one another chance”, “I’ve got all the others by [insert artist name], so I’ll hang on to that” and so on. I need to be more ruthless, but easier said than done in my case. I was a bit more successful with books.
I am slowly persuading myself that if I get rid of the chaff, I will have more time to spend on the wheat, so to speak. I tell myself that I don’t listen to the stuff I really like because I’m too busy buying* and listening to stuff that I might like.
* I buy mostly from charity shops/car boot sales. That means that the initial cost of trying out new-to-me stuff is low, although the cost of storage has now become an issue.
I may not have helped you, but I think I have formulated some advice to myself: (1) be ruthless; and (2) stay away from the chazzers (and Ebay, esp. when alcohol has been taken).
It did just occur to me @dr-volume that once you’ve successfully reduced your various collections, you’ll have to change your user name to Dr Less Volume.
Edit: Smaller Volume? “Less Volume” doesn’t sound quite right.
Lower volume?
Pardon. You’ll have to speak up, young man!
If you are planning any great length of stay, custom built is probably best. I just googled to see if the guy I used a couple of decades ago is still in business, seemingly not, but he came in, listened and designed some brilliant shelves, then built ’em, cheaper than buying job lots of Ikea flatpacks. He seems not to be, but there are many other suppliers/carpenters. Plus, when I first moved, another carpenter took them down and refitted. Annoyingly I moved again and now have a range of flatpacks. Buying enough for what you may need in the future is the toughest issue, as you will estimate wrongly, as have I, meaning a harsh one in, one out policy….. (I have 4 of this, below, and I like them, even if they bow a bit in the middle of each shelf)
https://www.watsonsontheweb.co.uk/harrogate–760-cd–318-dvd–bluray-media-storage-shelves–oak.htm?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIvJ7Mkdfy4wIVF-DtCh1Mpg9OEAYYBiABEgLoZPD_BwE
Vinyls stack along the floor, as they tend to be a static number, although a 2nd unexpected has arrived today following my belief I was ordering a band camp download. Hey ho…….
I’m pretty ruthless with CDs. A lot of what cluttered up shelves was crap early releases of favourite albums, really shoddy transfers (the early Beatles CDs anyone?)
So if they’re on iTunes I ditch them. If I REALLY want a physical copy I’m a sucker for remastered vinly. Don’t mention Abbey Road…
Books are harder. I keep ALL the music ones but can happily get rid of the thrillers.
Magazines – got rid of a complete Mojo collection a few years ago (kept a few, sold 1-10 online) and DO NOT MISS THEM
Hope this helps
For vinyl, Ikea Kallax are great. I had a good few years of temporary storage as we were doing work in the house and it is great to have the records easily accessible again. The units are not very expensive but it is worth planning to allow some additional space in case you buy any more in the future. I can get about 70 LPs in each cube before it gets tight for flicking through. (If you need a 3 by 3 box to store your current collection, consider getting a 3 by 4.) Also consider what sizes are available for future expansion – I have a 2×2 which is full of music books that my record deck sits on.
I screwed in some hardboard at the back as the units themselves are not as solid as I would like for all the weight that is in them. This is pretty simple to do.
CDs – I have been trimming them down, and at some point this year I need to go through the remaining 6 boxes of CDs. When I started the process of deciding which ones I needed to keep, the early stage was hard – I need to keep the AC/DC !! Alice Cooper !! … THE AINTS!! Then I hit The Beatles, and realised that the main reason I had bought them on CD was so that my daughters had the music around – great for family car journeys. So I stripped that down to Rubber Soul and Revolver … Traded them in to Monorail and to Love Music for more vinyl.
When going through the towers and boxing them up, the question I kept asking myself was “When will I open the box and play this again?”
I now have 2 of the Ikea Gnedby towers – that holds the jazz box sets and a selection of CDs which are there on a trial basis. Quite a few of them have moved on to the Discogs pile, or have been included in the many trade-in runs. I will keep the CDs that are special, or that I am likely to play at some point in the next few years.
A good friend trimmed his collection regularly by nominating a shelf as “Death Row”. This is where he would put CDs that he found when looking for other things that either he had forgotten he had, or ones that had been mentioned recently, or CDs that made him think “why do I still own a copy of Wowee Zowee, when I haven’t played it or even thought about it for 15 years?”. I have tried to do similar.
My Kallax has the top left box nominated as “Things To Listen To Soon”. This is similar to the “Death Row” principle, and some do end up in the Discogs slot after their visit there, but it means that when I am looking for a Dr Alimantado record, and instead find Dr Feelgood’s Be Seeing You, I can put Be Seeing You up there to catch up with at a more appropriate time.
Some of my newer LPs (all the ones from Monorail) came in nice plastic sleeves. Senora Malo noticed this and suggested it would be better if I did this for all of them – so I did. They are easier to riffle through and get some level of protection from dirt and dust.
Back to the key question – “when will I listen to this again?”
good luck!
Do those plastic sleeves really make them easier to rifle through? I’ve never liked them and I usually throw them away. I also hate the way they feel on my fingers. Prefer the touch of cardboard….mmmmm….
I had some of my collection in those PVC sleeves, but fear of outgassing made me get rid of them. Freed up several inches of shelf space!
‘Fear Of Outgassing’; three more from them later.
Its another of those irregular verbs; I outgas, he poots, they fart tremendously.
I open a window and start up the fan.
So.. you peeled off those PVC sleeves…
….ohhhhh
I have no CDs. I have books instead. Thousands of ’em. Before we moved into current flat I got shelves built pretty much everywhere.
*puts on weary face* We have just finished the third and final go at emptying the container all our stuff went in when we went to Oz in 2014. The first chunk went to the flat in Folkestone, the second to London to be distributed round the offspring or sold (fortunately No.1 son was resting at the time). The final chunk included all the family photos, the usual boxes of superannuated computer kit, cables, old HDDs, etc, the aerial photos my dad filched from his office in Cairo in 1945 and lugged back to Blighty in his kitbag, clothes belonging to the late Mrsthep that the daughter said five years ago she wanted to keep, some unloved furniture, a so-last-decade TV…and two bog brushes. I was obviously fond of them 5 years ago, but now we’re through.
And now it’s all gone, variously to the tip, various chazzas, a couple of chairs to a dealer in Lostwithiel, or distributed round the flat so it’s now invisible. The flat’s pretty musty, but hey…
Irony alert: I left my DVD collection with friends in Cornwall, having ditched the boxes and put them all in one of those big wallet things. When I retrieved it I was reminded what a sensational collection it was…so I’m having to buy a new player. I have no idea what happened to the last one. At least they’re a lot cheaper now…
Why am I telling you all this? I have to tell someone.
Some wisdom (and gags) on this thread @dr-volume
Ah, I had missed that one, I shall peruse with interest.
Divorce. It’s the only way to keep it all.
A certain Mr R. Plant once advised that if you’re intending leaving your loved one, you should make sure the record collection is in the car before you tell them.
Obviously that quote comes from the days when record collections were strictly vinyl and not so large as they are nowadays. My collection of indispensible CDs, MiniDiscs, DVDs, vinyl, cassettes and books would currently take about 10 trips in my car. I suspect that if I had one, a soon-to-be-ex-partner would become suspicious long before I’d got everything out of the door.
A separate point is what will happen to it all when I pop my clogs?
None of my close family are great music lovers, so the CDs, minidiscs and cassettes will probably be skipped, along with my HDDs of digitised music. My brother and my sister (possibly my oldest nephew’s missus too) will divvy up the books and the ones they don’t want plus the vinyl might end up in a charity shop.
My stuff has really got out of hand. I’ve always been of the opinion that if something is getting stuffed in a box and stored in the loft/garage then you might as well get rid of it. So for a long time I had a one-in-one-out policy on CDs and DVD/Blu Rays, but I eventually reached a point whereby there was nothing else I was prepared to get rid of.
I managed to convince the wife to let me have a second, smaller shelving unit in the corner of the living room for DVDs. However, this had a major knock on effect which led to me buying roughly another 800 CDs! I’ve mentioned this before, but the new DVD shelf meant the Christmas tree couldn’t go in it’s usual place, so we switched the sofa and chair around, exposing my two CD shelving units and hi-fi. This, coupled with me stopping working on medical grounds, led to me listening to a lot of CDs, when for years I had only listened to MP3s, having ripped the CDs to iTunes. Of course, the music sounded 10 times better this way.
On reading about Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly, I bought it, loved it and noticed that my rap section was very small. This led me on a journey where I have now got hundreds of rap CDs. I also eat about looking for gaps throughout my CD collection, hence 3 years later it has expanded to a ridiculous level and has caused me major headaches. Sorting out my CD shelves has since become a regular occurrence, each time with me declaring I am buying no more!
I managed to make room by moving all my Beatles bootlegs upstairs. That gained a shelf. And then I moved all the CDs that were part of ‘collections’ and which rarely would get played. So this meant stripping down the Pet Shop Boys and Stephen Duffy collections to the basic albums and one or two other discs that will get played. That gained 2 shelves. And finally I moved all the wife’s rubbish into a cupboard in the living room, as she never plays them. But then it got hard, and the cupboard gradually got filled up. I’m now at the point where I really don’t want to move anything else off the shelves, cos there’s already some good stuff in the cupboard. I even sorted the cupboard out last week, so the best stuff was more visible when I open the door. I really do need to stop buying CDs, although I’m still in bed this morning (I’m in America) and I’ve already managed to buy one online! The Infinite Dub Sessions by Deadbeat & Paul St Hilaire. Just listened to it on my iPod and it’s fab.
Of course, most CDs are worthless these days, so if there are any that I would consider selling I wouldn’t get any more than pennies for them, so I might as well keep them.
Upstairs, the books, magazines and comics have got totally out of hand, yet my reading had slowed almost to a halt until recently. I think the Japanese have a word for it. I managed to convince the wife to let me rip out the fitted wardrobes in the spare bedroom and erect 4 (now 5) large shelving units, so the room now resembles a library. But I must stop buying books. Of course, I have already bought one this morning, Spencer Leigh’s book on Buddy Holly.
There are also other collections that are taking over the house. Football programmes, trading cards, autographs, Batman toys, Lego sets, James Bond memorabilia.
But I really do need to slow down. My wife is very tolerant, but she is now running out of patience. Dai may be right. I think she only puts up with it because a recent valuation for insurance purposes has shown her how much she can flog it for when I pop my clogs. I have to check the stairs for marbles and roller skates…
“My wife is very tolerant” – AW T-shirt
PS. I read this and winced.We’re not all this lucky.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/aug/02/husband-humour-turnoff-annalisa-barbieri#comment-131665726
“But when he tells the same stories again, I find him less attractive”
Thank goodness she isn’t married to an Afterworder
I’ve shared this story with Mrs M. She’s gone verrrry quiet.
I am suspicion.
PPS. An anecdote in the comments field made me laugh more than I have done for weeks. It’s the Guardianest thing I’ve ever read. It begins:
I was taking an old AGA range to the council’s recycling facility. …
No further questions, your honour!
Must have had a serious f8ck-off truck to put it on too, as they weigh only slightly less than the equivalent volume of neutron star.
Being a Guardian-reader, I expect a little man in the village did the heavy lifting.
We had to get rid of a coal-fired Rayburn once (this is more of a Cornish Guardian story). On Gumtree for £250 (buyer collects). Nope. Man with van to take it away. Nope. On Gumtree for £0. Nope…until one day, a bloke rang from Lands End airfield, where he did welding courses for disaffected youth. He turned up in a ute and proceeded to lay into the thing with an enormous sledge hammer, and basically bashed the thing to bits. The noise and dust were appalling. I asked him if his students were going to weld it all back together again and he chuckled, so I don’t know if that was a yes or no.
I might have politely enquired if the gentleman had ever been a member of Test Department.
My advice.
If you’re going to tell the same jokes over and over, at least stick to telling just the short ones.
Certainly a man who says “I now need to tell the really funny 10-minute cake story” needs to be rugby-tackled to the ground in his own interests as much as those of anyone else.
Men everywhere need to be reminded..
Always a pleasure to hear from you, Paul. I might show the ever-tolerant Mrs F your post as evidence that I’m not as bad as she thinks I am!
FWIW, we cull books every couple of years and CDs are all digitised and stored. If we downsized, I’d think about getting rid of the CDs but it’s not an issue at the moment. We don’t have enough DVDs for it to be a problem. If I could only keep one type of physical product it would be the vinyl, mainly because it’s more difficult to digitise.
I have a similar problem at my warehouse. I’m at capacity, with some of the equipment being no longer in demand but only worth a fraction of what I paid for it, assuming anyone would buy it at all. I’m going to have to take the pain to clear some space soon.
Let me know when you do, I know people…
I’ll make a list soon and let you know. The big stuff is mainly video although there’s a bit of sound too.
Last year Mrs Japanese and I moved from a one-bedroom flat into a four-bedroom detached. We (I) still had to downsize on our (my) CD collection. I spent a fair bit of last year buying second-hand CDs whilst going through the 1001 Albums book, and found slimline cases from slim-disc.com to be the best solution.
I got to the point where our second bedroom contained all my stuff. it was fine. The Mrs was happy with an uncluttered living room. When children started coming back home to live during domestic upheavals I had to cram it all into the 3rd bedroom instead.
CDs were easy. I put 1000 of them into a big metal box after throwing away all the cases. After that I did the same with DVD/Blu Rays. what used to occupy two walls full of floor-to-ceiling shelves into a pile of metal boxes. The pile of discarded cases was remarkable.
All my CDs were ripped to the computer anyway. Since I did that, five years ago, I don’t think I have opened the CD box at all. I listen through the computer or streaming and the actual discs are just backup. The only CD cases I kept were for some krautrock compilations and a punk boxset, because the packages were so nice. I also have the handful of CDs I bought since then in their cases, but only because the metal box was full.
I thought it would kill me not having everything on display and in sight all the time, but it just made me realise how much I was getting dominated by stuff. If I could easily scan my massive book collection I would think about it, but I can’t bring myself to get rid of them, like I did with my vinyl 10 years ago. It was hard enough just getting rid of surplus dictionaries to free up some shelf space.
I remember a while ago we had a thread where people declared the size (oo-er missus) of their collections. I was quite humbled by how small mine was (oo-er missus) compared to everyone else. I’ve got a relatively modest 1000 CDs and 500 LPs (very rough approximation). Most of this was built up over quite a short period of four/five years between the onset of financial comfort and the end of singledom.
Here’s a question that I think I already know the answer to. Do any of you feel like you’ve “finished” collecting music? I (kind of) think I do, a bit. Music buying is only an occasional thing for me now, maybe one CD or record a month on average. And if something happened to stop me buying music (say, the market suddenly blew up and music became prohibitively expensive) I honestly don’t think I would mind TOO much. I would rationalise it and say “I have enough”.
That’s a good post topic right there.
Ha ha! I’m not starting another post until I collate all the results of my “60 years of 60 albums” poll which turned unexpectedly massive. (An update is imminent, in case you wondered…).
By the way, one thing that 60 years poll has made me realise is how less and less the music matters to me as I go through the years. There are the usual tentpole high achievers from the mid sixties right up to the eighties, but getting into the nineties and noughties and beyond the music gets more and more anonymous – I’m finding a lot of modern albums and acts I just haven’t heard of (requiring a lot more spell-checking and sense checking as I go through it all!).
As far as I’m concerned, I would tentatively conclude that the “rock canon” (“rock” meaning the full gamut of modern music, from pop to jazz) is now pretty much closed. And probably has been for about twenty years at least.
What’s my point? (Genuine question, I’ve wandered from what I was going to say….)
Oh, yes, my point being that I don’t think of the rock canon as a continuous, evolving thing that I need to keep participating in by continuing to buy music. Hence why I don’t buy music with anything like the intensity in my formative years of exploration!
I’m very glad you wrote this and feel exactly the same. I feel guilty about it; I ‘should’ be buying more stuff. Undoubtedly I’m missing out on some gems.
I buy the odd track but I feel pretty much ‘done’ and have done for about 10 years (the tail-off of my ‘top 60’ demonstrates this (with one or two exceptions)).
Do start a post on this when you have time! Thanks for your work on the 60.
I often think that I had all the music I really need by the time I was 21. Everything since has been chasing the dragon.
Come to think of it, the first CD I would have bought after turning 21 would have been Second Coming. Perfect harbinger of things to come.
Jings, stop? I bloody wish……. Cambridge saw added probably 10 cds over just 4 or so days. I try to be sensible and not overly spendthrift, but I keep on finding interesting unexplored pathways. For example, I am awaiting Inge Thomson’s recent LP, having been struck by the bald woman on accordion, electronic percussion and vocals with Karine Polwart, discovering then that she is the wife of Martin Green in Lau. That combination proved irresistible (and I haven’t even heard the fucker.) Plus I suddenly have a thing for using band camp to explore and buy, over the more conventional amazon searches.
One day I may be better.
Just remember…. the more music you love, the more that love is diluted! Happy the man who has had just one Dire Straits CD in his car since 1985, for his love is pure…
And his kicks are free.
Try also Inge’s previous band, Drop The Box. Their second album, Honeytrap, is on spotty. Try Silver Fox. Or PM me for help.
She’s Mrs F’s bridesmaid’s cousin.
Inge’s ‘Sink or swim’ arrived today, along with a lovely note, thanking me for buying directly from the artist, throwing in a copy of her 2nd album just cos she could! On half first listening, S or S is great, all accordion, sparse and odd electronica and quirky songs, Heidi Talbot doing much of the vocal heavy lifting. A find that makes all my constant investigating worth the while.
It is the impurities, like bacteria, that keep my love vital and alive.