Friday, August 26, 2011

Napkin Doon 2.0 = Attacking Storage:

I assume many of you can relate to the problem of your collection getting out of hand.  Most of you are like me in that you have jobs, families or other obligations and can’t spend a whole lot of time working on your collection.  The lovely wife hides it pretty well, but I believe she must get pretty exasperated with the space my collection takes up.  There is some here, some there… some everywhere.   When she used to find an empty penny sleeve on the floor she would ask if I needed it.  Now when she sees one on the floor she just picks it up and holds it up to my face for a good hard 5 seconds before throwing it away.   So, as I did with my checklist, I put some elbow grease into my actual card collection, and I think, tidied it up quite nicely.  Here are a couple of before pictures, although they really don’t adequately capture the totality of my disorganization:

You might suspect I staged this area for effect, but no, I really am that big of a slob.

I suppose I could have shoved the toys out of the way..
And now, the after:

Man, I turn myself on sometimes…
I wish I had the time and talent to put together a video montage of me working this stuff over.  Instead, here is the best non “Rocky” video montage ever, courtesy Team America.  Just pretend it’s footage of me sorting my cards. 

I still have a long ways to go.  I would like to get the albums more uniform looking and the boxes labeled.  But at least is all on one place now, and the penny sleeves are off the floor.
Napkin Doon Collection Sanity Rule #2:  My entire working collection* has be able to fit on the above shelving unit.    
 *Complete collated and factory sets in boxes may be placed elsewhere.  I must have a Topps factory set every year, and if I stored the ones I already have, plus a new one each year, I would have no room for anything else.  This is the lone exception to this rule.

3 comments:

GCA said...

You poor married guys. I have a whole bookshelf about that size full of binders, plus an entire china cabinet full of white boxes, and one shelf of MORE binders. And then the stack of monster boxes on the floor as high as the desk. Add in the nine "card locker" cases with my football team collection. And that doesn't count the three monster boxes in the other room for tradeables, plus several set boxes on the desk that are active at the time...

carlsonjok said...

Nice. I live in an old farm house, so storage space is limited. My card closet looks alot like your before picture, except that it is sharing the space with tax records, camera equipment, and my "save for special occasions" wine.

The only other option would be up in the hay loft of the barn, but that seems sacrilegious.

The Lost Collector said...

Doesn't look like there's too much room left for more binders of 1991 Donruss from Cleve's.