Collection Curation

I've been working my tail off on the basement, trying to get the basement unpacked from the move (2 years ago) and ready to be used in total instead of just a few cleared out areas. The mess is largely mine. I am horribad at putting things away, but I'm really trying to get better about that. It's so much easier to work on anything if you can easily find all the things you need!

So the weekend my husband was at WorldCon, I worked in the basement. It was a long weekend (a very long weekend...) but I had few distractions and got a ton done. This Saturday, I was back at it, but getting really discouraged. It seemed like no matter how much I got done, there was still so much to do; I wasn't ever going to get done.

We'd talked about getting some inexpensive bookcases at Ikea to house the figure collection. The shelves we put up are awesome, but there just aren't enough of them. I was out of room and still had a ton of figures yet to unbox. These unboxed toys were part of the issue in the basement -- those boxes of action figures take up a lot of room, and were in the way. So Saturday afternoon, while I was feeling pretty limp and discouraged, Marc asked if getting those shelves up would help. "Maybe?" I told him. I really wasn't sure just how much difference it was going to make. We went to Ikea, ate there, wrestled with the crowds of people who apparently have all the spacial and situational awareness of your average dandelion. (Sadly, punching people in the back of the head is illegal. *grumble*) We had to unpackage one of the boxes just to get all five of them in the car.

Even though I was tired, I started putting them together. By the time I got to the fifth case, I was so sore from all the bending, my husband had to build it. I think it was one in the morning before we went to bed. (And I had to drag my butt up two flights, then try to get into a bed that sits on risers -- that was challenging.) When the pup woke us at 6:30, he got up with her; I went back to sleep and didn't get up til 8. (I married a great guy.)

After getting to sleep in, I was reasonably energetic and eager to start on moving the collection. Had some coffee, took some ibuprofen, and headed downstairs to get started. I worked on it until around 4 in the afternoon. I unboxed a bunch. I arranged and rearranged and played action figure dominoes, and generally had a marvelous time. He asked me, "Are you happy?" Yes, yes I am. They look awesome. They're out of the packaging, because they're toys that are meant to be played with. They are not my retirement fund.

So, as a reminder, here's what they looked like on the shelves before I moved them:

4" shelves worked fine, for a while, and they did fit the space nicely
without sticking out too far into the walkway.

The Star Trek/Star Wars (really, "Science Fiction") display has to stay where it was, and that's fine, really, since the wall they occupy isn't good for much else, anyway.

There's a few more figures on these shelves now, but I'm too tired to run back down and take a current photo.

And here is what they look like now:

In case you don't recognize the boxes on the bottom shelf, those are full of comic books.

This is the center: Wonder Woman is at (my) eye level, and Sailor Moon above.

I have sort of a love/hate relationship with Barbie. On the one hand, I feel the unrealistic image she
brainwashes little girls with is evil, but on the other, Hallowe'en!

Hopefully, the Fisher-Price Wonder Woman in her invisible jet negates the evil Barbieness.

The bookcases we used were Ikea's Kilby. They are 6'3" tall, 2'2" wide and 9.5" deep. It's hard to see from the photos, but the finish is "birch", so it fades into the beige paint that's on the walls. The backing is a very neutral grey, good for displaying figures against. What I ought to do now is get a 2x4 and cut it to width, so I can raise up the figures in the back row (or maybe check the garage and see if we have some scrap I can scavenge). Enclosed units would be swell, but those are very expensive, and way out of our budget.

The end result of this, other than making my geeky heart very happy, was the emptying of a few more boxes, getting the comic boxes out of random stacks on the floor (well, most of them), and allowing me to move the DVD collection from a couple of shelving units on the other end of the basement to the shelves that I had the figures on before.

The comics are one of my next near-future projects. I need to do an inventory of them and consolidate boxes (they aren't all full). And since my back is still aching, that might be a better task for today than the endless bending and sorting of the piles of "misc" that fill up the space. Or maybe, since I only got 5 hours of sleep, I'll go back to bed...