A Little Man Cave Renovating and Reorganizing!

On Monday of this week, I spent a good chunk of my Memorial Day working in my wood shop (i.e. the back of my garage).  My project?  A brand new bookshelf of sorts.

The backstory here is that when we moved into our new house a few years ago, the old homeowners left behind a big ol' desk in the basement (the home of my man cave now).  I've been using the desk for my baseball cards (and blogging) ever since we moved in but the front of the desk has always sort of bugged me.  For reasons that I don't know, there was this weird large indentation in the desk - that is, the top of the desk overhangs the "wall" of the desk by about a foot.  

A few weeks ago, I decided that I would finally get around to filling in that useless space by making a shelf for my board game collection.  

To do so, I took some old heavy duty lumber that was left in my garage by previous contractors and I cut it up and built a super solid shelf for board games (those boxes can be very heavy)!  I then a roll of old, hideous wallpaper (also left behind by the old owners of the house) and used that was the "shelf paper" to make sure that the boxes for my games stay pristine while on the bookshelf.  

In the end, I think the shelf turned out really nice considering I used almost all hand-me-down stuff that had been left behind!  

After building the shelf, the real fun was putting all my games on the shelf...well, that and trying to figure out how to actually organize my collection.

As you can probably tell, I'm a huge fan of board games!  The sad thing about that is that I don't actually have many people to play those games with.  My brother comes home around Christmas so I can play with him for a week or so and I have a colleague at work who likes co-op games so he and I play those sometimes.  Otherwise, the games kind of just sit there on the shelf...but they way I see it is that it's my job to make sure my young son learns to like games - then I'll have someone to play with whenever I feel like it!  

In terms of organizing my collection, I ended up using the new space to store my main games (those meant for 2-4 players mostly), as well as my co-op collection, and my two-player games.  

That's not all of my games though.  I also have another cheap bookshelf with games on it...this holding mostly party games and a bunch of small card games (plus Fireball Island since that box is obnoxiously large).

I also have a bunch of older games that were hand-me-downs from my grandparents and/or from my own childhood.  Those are mostly your "classics" such as Monopoly, Risk, Clue, Aggrevation, Sorry, etc.  Games that, quite honestly, I'll probably never choose to play again though I'll never say never if someone really wants to have a go at one of those.  That said, my real game collection has so many wonderful games in it that I think I could probably find something to interest just about anyone!  

The simple act of reorganizing my collection and looking through all my games has revived my interest in doing some more Friday Game Review posts.  I'm also tempted to go back through my Top 10 Board Games list that I made last September and see if anything has changed since then...I'm guessing that the list would look at least a little bit different!

Let me know in the comments if you are interested in board games or should I stick to baseball cards mostly here at Nachos Grande?  If you do like games, I'd love to hear about your favorite(s) as well!