How to Hide Unsightly CDs

I am a child of the 90’s and I still have mountains of CDs laying around the house to prove it.  Even though I’ve gotten rid of many over the years, I still have quite a collection that I’m just not ready to part with.  Mine are obviously not in total disarray since we’re talking about me here, but I did want to find a way to pretty them up – AKA hide them. 

While I used to love seeing a long row of my favorite jams sitting on the shelf, and thoroughly enjoy showing off my extensive collection, I now think that they look outdated and sloppy on my updated office shelves.  Plus, nobody wants to see The Spice Girls, Ace of Base, or Alanis Morissette hanging out in their office.  (Yes, I do still have all of those CDs, and no, I’m not ashamed.)  So I decided to figure out a way to hide them.   

My first thought was to place cute frames and knick knacks in front of them, but that looked too busy... the frames and knick knacks just got lost in the all of the chaos behind them.  At that point I knew I wanted to completely cover the CDs, so I set out to find materials: 

Materials 

Foam board (I purchased a 20x30 sheet at Hobby Lobby for only a few bucks)

Fabric of your choice

Ribbon of your choice

Tape measure

Box cutter

Tape (masking tape or duct tape will do)

Pencil  

Step One 

Measure the shelves that you want to cover to determine the size of each board.  You will need to measure just inside the walls of the shelves since the boards will be cut to fit between them.  Mine were 5.5 inches tall and 30 inches wide. 

Step Two  

Lay the foam board on a flat surface and mark the measurements. 

Step Three 

Using a box cutter, cut the foam board along the lines that you drew in step two. 

Step Four 

Lay the fabric face-down and lay the piece of foam board that you cut out on top of it.  Cut the fabric around the foam board leaving an inch or two of extra fabric around all of the edges of the board. 

Step Five 

Tape the edges down to the back of the foam board

Step Six 

Cut a piece of ribbon and tape it to the back corner of the board with the decorative side facing out.  This will be used as a tab to easily pull the boards out from the shelf.  You can place them anywhere on the boards – left or right sides, tops or bottoms.  I placed mine in the top left corner of each of my boards. 

Repeat this process for each shelf that you want to hide.  I had a total of six in order to hide all of my CDs.   

BEFORE

AFTER

See how much neater that looks?  And you can now place frames or knick knacks in front of the boards, and they won’t get lost in a jumble of 90’s boy band CD spines.  

This project is a simple way to breathe new life into a room and hide clutter.  The best part is, you can use this method to hide anything – CDs, DVDs, VHS Tapes (yes, I still have a few), messy shelves that you don’t feel like cleaning, tacky old gifts from your Mother-in-Law... luckily I don’t have any of those to hide, because my MIL has impeccable taste!  (And no, I’m not being sarcastic.)  This is yet another project with endless possibilities! 

Eventually I’m sure I will decide to part with most of my CDs (never, never my Dave Matthews Band collection – I will have those until my dying day), but until then, I’ll just keep them hidden behind these gorgeous boards.