The Great Reorganization: Step 39: Will It Ever End?!

Way back in March of 2014, I started a blog series that I called "The Great Reorganization."  At the time, I had no idea that I'd still be talking about organizing my collection over eight years later...and that's including a move from one house to another!

Flash forward to present day, my collection is still not fully organized but it is much larger than it was back in 2014!  Also, here's how long I've been collecting and blogging about it...I referenced the website Listia which probably no one reading this now has any idea what that site was about!

Anyhow, I haven't put forth much of an honest effort in terms of getting my full collection under control for quite some time (despite putting that down as one of my New Year's Resolutions for the past several years).  That being said, I am rapidly running out of space as far as my card collection goes so I'm kind of at the point where I either organize stuff or I simply stop collecting anything new.  Obviously, the "stop collecting" part sounds terrible, so I guess I actually must organize.

Today's post isn't going to be one where I get to show off anything that I've done recently.  Instead, it's going to be more a measuring stick for future posts where hopefully I'll have some discernable evidence that I've actually accomplished some modicum of organizational success.

Let's start with some of the worst offenders of my collection and work our way to at least one success story that I can share now.

We'll begin with a double-stacked white cabinet of baseball card terror. 

I had to move the mess you see above into the white cabinet mostly because it was such an eyesore that it couldn't remain on open shelves.  I honestly have no idea about what's on most of those shelves.  This might not look that bad but it's only the tip of the iceberg so to speak.  On the stacked shelf directly below this one is another shelf with doors covering the mess:

Yeah, that's rough.  It's a bunch of boxes of cards that have been separated by team.  A quaint idea that was marginally helpful back when trading was done on the blog and was mostly "send me team X and I'll send you team Y."  Based on the blaster boxes I used to store those team cards, you can see that most of this organizational work was completed between 2009 and 2012 or so (aka the Golden Age of baseball card blogs)!

Moving on from there, I also have some of those larger baseball card boxes full of cards that are currently divided up by team.  

That batch is simply more cards that wouldn't fit inside my white cabinet shelf thing.

While there's obviously hours (and hours) of sorting needed to get through most of the above stuff, that's again only a fraction of the unsorted mess that I currently have lying around.  I've got an entire shelf full of random Reds that need sorted, I've got the space in front of my TV littered with random cards, etc. etc.  It's frankly embarrassing!

All that said, I have managed a few minor successes that I think are worth mentioning here.

The most organized shelf is the one you see above - plenty of large card boxes full of cards from specific sets.  Each set is in numerical order and every card in those boxes is listed over on my TCDB trade bait page.  

I also have another shelf with even more cards listed for trade on TCDB, though this one is still in need of some level of organizing (specifically, I need more of those card boxes)!

Not every card on that shelf is for trade though as some of those cards are my own cards that I've either gotten for group breaks that I've participated in or via trades.  Like I said, it's a mess!

Obviously, I have my work cut out for me.  Perhaps even more so now than back when I started my Great Reorganization blog series!  That being said, there are a few signs of life on the organizational front so maybe, just maybe, not all is lost!  I have found that using TCDB has given me a lot of motivation to get as much of my trade bait listed over there as possible - and clearly I've done a decent job of that thus far (my current stats on TCDB say I have 14,888 total cards listed for trade on the site)!!

Some of my next steps include clearing off my TV stand (I didn't even take a photo of that for now, it's too embarrassing), clearing out at least one of the white shelves, and finally, organizing those team boxes into their respective sets (and then listing those cards on TCDB).  So much to do yet!