New Year's (Cardboard) Resolutions

Each year January comes rolling around I see post after post of New Year's Resolutions. It seems that many blogger's have the same type of resolutions, whether's to post more, be more active in the community, make more trades, or even get rid of cards. Another popular resolution I often see is getting organized. Easier said than done.

While I have many of these same resolutions as others, I've been meaning to get myself better organized for years now. I've gained so many cards over the past few years from hosting my Affordable Group Breaks, to trades to the kind generosity of others sending me their unwanted Atlanta Braves and Carolina Panthers cards. While this has been a lot of fun, trying to get them all cataloged, scanned in some cases and organized has been something that I've just put off. You know the saying that once your hobby becomes work it loses all it's fun? Well that has nearly happened to me and may explain the huge drop off in the number of posts I had in 2016.

I'm here to say though that I'm taking this resolution of getting organized seriously and I'm already underway. Some months back I remember coming across these shoe box houses that BCW offers and being quite impressed. I've been using about 5 monster boxes to store my cards and various player and team collections...but those are huge, heavy and a burden to work within. Needless to say the box I needed to get to was always at the bottom of the stack. That's where these shoe box houses come into play. Each house can store six of BCW's two row shoe boxes. They (somewhat) easily pull out so you can get to what you need, then when you are done slide right back in. I decided to take some Christmas cash and purchase two of these houses, along with some other supplies from BCW so I could finally get some organization to my collection.

Pretty much all this past weekend I sat at the dinner table that I claimed and set up shop. I first had to assemble the aforementioned shoe box houses. Once that was complete I assembled the shoe boxes and got out all of my supplies. I don't know if I'm OCD or not, but it bugged me that I couldn't locate certain cards, or that I could get to my various collections easily when it was time to put away cards. They often would end up in stacks and before long I forgot why I stacked those cards. Did they need to be simply put away? Or did I need to catalog them first? Argh!! Surely I'm not the only one to go through this, am I? I ordered 100 of those little white dividers so I could sort out my various player collections, as well as sort out the different years for my team collections. I thought 100 would be enough, but wouldn't you know I ran out before I was done.

Many of those "mystery stacks" ended up in a large plastic container such as this. There were plenty of opened bubble mailers laying around that I had to address as well. I started over the weekend going through this container, card by card, and checking to see if I had at least cataloged it. If not, onto the Google document it went and then I created a divider for that player and inserted into a box. I was only able to make a dent in this container before I found the weekend winding down, so upstairs everything went to my office.

My office is a hodge podge of things. As many of you know I have multiple hobbies and outside of my video games, they are all in my home office. The stack of 5 monster boxes used to reside under this white table where I keep my light box up for photographing toys and such. I pulled all of these out so I could insert the card houses. The next step is to go through each monster box and find new homes for these cards, of course in a more organized fashion. In the coming weeks or even months, I do plan on having giveaways as I know I have some cards I no longer wish to hold onto. I won't be selling these, only asking for interested parties to pay for the shipping.

Of all the supplies I bought, hands down one of my favorites has been these Tobacco card sleeves. Inside the penny sleeve is a little welded pocket for your mini cards. The sleeve itself is of a higher quality (i.e. thicker) plastic than your traditional penny sleeve. I'm not using top loaders for the majority of my PCs (to save space), but I hated how the mini cards sat in the box, even in a traditional sleeve. These new sleeves are great, they even hold the small Cracker Jack cards pretty well. This may not be new news to some of you seasoned collectors, but I was only aware of the pages for tobacco sized cards.

Needless to say I'm on the long road of getting my collection finally organized like I want. Even though I've just begun, I've got to admit it feels good. I have to be very organized in my work life so I don't understand why that doesn't carry over more to my home life. Part of this process I'm undertaking is getting all of my collections uploaded to my Google Drive account where I plan to make them available to the general public. I've also been uploaded scans of inserts, autos and relics of many of these players as I go along. Many of these will be uploaded to the various albums I have on the blog's Facebook page, but I also hope to create and post galleries of certain players.

If nothing else comes out of this adventure, I'm starting to feel like I'm breathing new life into cards and this blog. I know once I get closer to being done, the more I'll be able to enjoy this wonderful hobby of collecting little square pieces of picture cardboard.