Spring Cleaning in December

I always get the spring cleaning bug in winter. It's usually around Christmas, because we're getting things in and out of closets and I'm appalled at the state of storage in some of them. So far, I/we have done tons of work in the now perfectly organized game room:

• completely cleaned out and re-organized the closet
• got rid of two trash bags of Lauren's stuffed animals (don't worry, she still has about 4 bags worth)
• gathered up no longer played video games and controllers to sell to Amazon

We also decided to sell all our CDs, since we store and listen to our music on computers and iPods. The last real CD any of us bought, with liner notes and everything, was about four years ago. (And major labels will no longer make CDs after 2012.) The only place I play CDs is on trips in the car, and I can use my iPhone there or burn a CD from iTunes anytime I want to. Most of the CDs in our car are mixes burned from iTunes.

Think of all the space you can clear!

Before you rid yourself of original CDs, make sure that you did indeed rip all of them to your device of choice, and also that you continue or begin to keep backups of your music. We automatically back ours up to a computer every week. There's also the cloud as a backup option.

A couple of other tips: Online stores that buy CDs are reported to pay the same as local stores (most of them ARE local stores), so you can save shipping by just selling your CDs to your local reseller. Also, they like perfect jewel cases, so I moved any CDs with cracked or scratched cases to new ones. If you don't have extras sitting around, you'll probably have mix-CDs or other random non-sellable CDs with which you can switch cases.