My Collectibles Room – Assessing the Damages

My family has moved twice in the past 6 months.  Once was to a temporary place and now we are in the place that we will be living for a long time.  One of the positives of the new house is that the layout allowed for me to have a room to myself.  What’s even better is that the room is pretty much the whole third floor.  The bad news is that the room is in pretty bad shape and will need a lot of work to get it into usable condition.  It’s shaped weirdly and is almost all angled ceilings which presents challenges.  Hopefully I don’t get concussed up here by standing up in the wrong part of the room.

There’s the staircase up to the third floor.  Both railings are loose and need to be fixed.  There’s a small closet to the left of the stairs with an accordion door on the front of it.  That space could become handy, but it’s too out of the way to store anything that I’m going to use frequently.  I picture it as possibly a storage space for things like extra chairs and other stuff that would come in handy when people come to visit.

Ideally, this will be a room to showcase my collectibles as well as a place where I can have friends and family over for things like sporting events and wrestling pay per views.  If I get a better TV, I can also bring Rock Band or Guitar Hero up here when I don’t want to tie up the TV downstairs.

That ugly mirror has got to go.  That’s prime real estate for a framed picture.  I’ve got a ton of stuff that I want to put up on the walls and as you’ll see from these pictures, there isn’t a heck of a lot of space to hang the pictures unless they’re hung at a height appropriate for little children to look at.

There’s my tiny little TV.  It was a doorbuster special that I got back when I was working at Toys R Us in the late 90s.  It’s made for gaming and has multiple inputs.  (These days you just buy a switch and can easily add multiple consoles to one TV.)  There are doors that swing open which have speakers built into them and there’s also a big bass woofer on the back of the TV.  It’s still a great TV, but it’s a little small.  It’ll be used for my daughter to watch TV on and play her Leapfrog games on once I’m able to upgrade to a better TV.

This picture shows off some of the weirder parts of the room.  Keep in mind that the straight part of the wall is only 3’ 9” high.  From there', it’s all slanted ceiling.  There are two inset shelving areas in various locations.  They’re nice, but it isn’t nearly close to the amount of shelves that I’ll need.  To the left of the shelving area is a little door that leads into the attic-type space that is at the end of this room as well as around the side.  It’s dark and dirty in there and I don’t see myself ever using it for more than storage of stuff that I rarely ever use.  The attic space towards the end of the room is a lot more usable.  The weirdest part about this little door is the reflective metal on the front of it.  The middle tile has a design on it.  Luckily for me, the tiles have already started falling off of the door and I’ve only got 7 of them to get rid of once I get around to that.

Here’s the door to the attic space at the front of the house.  The roof is only seven and a half feet high at its apex so there’s no room for anything huge.  Luckily, I’ll be able to fit my 6’ IKEA Expedit bookcase in there with its 25 glorious compartments for the storage and display of my collection.

Check out the rug in front of the door that was left here by the previous owners.  They left a ton of junk in the house when it was sold and this was one of the few things that wasn’t absolute crap.  They had to pay for 1-800-GOT-JUNK to come and haul away the rest of the stuff, but I held onto the rugs for now.  The tile floor in the room is in terrible shape and will need to be replaced.  I’m thinking a nice parquet floor like you’d find in the Garden.  I want it to squeak if I were to make a hard cut in sneakers.

This picture doesn’t illustrate it all that well, but on this side of the room there are two inset areas that are about nine feet wide with a protruding section in the middle that is around 4 feet wide.  Those sections aren’t all that great as they are now, but they got my gears spinning and got me thinking of some ideas to improve the room.



Here’s a better picture of the protruding section that I mentioned.  The straight wall there is 6’ 4” tall and is something that I can live with.  It’s just a shame that wall isn’t larger.

In the background you can see the other nine foot section.  These would be nice places to store things, but as the room stands now it would just look like piles of stuff.  Even if I purchased shelving units, it still wouldn’t look at that great with everything exposed in piles and piles.

Here’s a wider view of the room.  What I forgot to take a picture of is the other inset shelving area.  It’s behind the protruding section and this one is a little larger with three shelves as opposed to the two in the other one.

Also in this picture is my IKEA Lack table and the beginnings of my Expedit desk that added another 8 display/storage cubes to the room.


One of the biggest challenges for this room will be what to do with the walls.  Most of the molding is already falling off so that will probably go.  I don’t know how much of a project getting rid of that horrible paneling is going to be or what I’ll find underneath.  I was thinking of painting the paneling, but I don’t know how well that would turn out.  It could be a disaster and I’m not really sure if I want a striped room.  In a dream world, I’d have a wall with the Green Monster painted on it.  I don’t think that is going to happen though.

Here’s a basic floor plan of how the attic is now that I whipped up in Google SketchUp.  It’s a great little program and I only used about 1% of its functionality.  The stairs are in the back, the two nine foot sections are on the right and you can see the door to the attic in the front.

I used this program to plan what I want to ideally have done with the room.  It’s fairly simple so it should end up happening.  What I want to do is have a wall built that basically extends the wall that protrudes in the middle creating two closed in areas with doors leading into them.  Within those closed in areas, I can build shelves to store things such as my finished sets and comic book storage boxes.  That way those things will be out of sight since I don’t need to access them often, but they will be easy to organize and access when I do want to get to them.  The new wall will give me somewhere to hang my pictures and stuff like that.

So, hopefully some of you out there found that interesting.  This first installment really didn’t mention any specific sports cards or collectibles, but as I get the room together and start to put things out, I’ll add them to the updates I’ll write about the room.  Thanks for reading and I’d love to hear any suggestions that you may have for the room.

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