Anniversary Loot

I recently celebrated my 4th Anniversary.  We didn’t do anything huge since we’re going to Disney World later in the year, but we had a nice weekend away in the Mystic, CT area.  We did some gambling at Mohegan Sun, did a little shopping and of course had a dinner and a movie date night.  We did this two years ago and enjoyed it so much that we decided to do it again this year.  On that first trip, I picked up a cool Red Sox wool pennant.  I picked up some cool goodies on this trip as well.

Mystic, CT is home of the Mystic Pizza restaurant made famous in the movie Mystic Pizza.  This original location was too small inside for filming, but the outside was used for the front of the restaurant in the movie.  The interior shots were filmed in the Mystic Pizza location in Stonington.  I added to two of my collections at Mystic Pizza.  I picked up a new pin for my pin board and pressed two pennies.  I was caught off guard and didn’t have enough change to press the third penny that was available.

I picked up a couple of other pins in a general store in Olde Mistick Village.  I’ve already got logo pins of both the Sox and Pats, but these were very nice and the price was right so I added them to the collection.  The pin board is now here, but I need to purchase something sturdy to hang it with.  Once that’s done, I’ll get some pictures of it up on the blog.  After this upcoming Disney trip, I may need a second board.

There’s also a shop in Olde Mistick Village that sells sports stuff.  A lot of the stuff there is overpriced since the store is in a touristy shopping area in a touristy town, but I did find something that I really wanted.

This Red Sox glass switch plate cover looks great in the room and will look even better once I touch up the paint a little.  I’ve got some Red Sox items in the room and the Celtics will be well represented, but I think I’ll have to search out some Patriots stuff (retro logo only, no ugly flying Elvis head logo) for the room as well.

Last, but not least was an oddball item that I had to pick up for myself.  My mother-in-law had given me the Red Sox version of this a couple of years ago for Christmas and it was a fun little gift.  When I saw the Celtics version, it had to be mine.

Here you can see Kevin McHale, Larry Legend, The Chief, Bill Russell, Bob Cousy, Reggie Lewis, Red Auerbach, Pierce and Dee Brown.  There’s three cards right into player collections and a bunch of other fun caricature cards.  I love this kind of oddball stuff.

Collectibles room update

So, once the work started on the upstairs room, we discovered a few more problems than we expected.  When they originally framed this room, they didn’t put up any walls.  They put up a very thin border and that’s about it.  Reality TV has exposed the shoddiness of many home inspectors and it looks like we had one of those shoddy inspectors when we purchased the house.  I’m pretty sure that’s something that he should have caught.

Here’s a view of the area behind my desk all ripped out.  The contractors found some interesting stuff on the top of the recessed area on the other side of the “wall.”  There were matches, cigarette packages and other stuff like that.  It looks like the prior tenant snuck back there to smoke.  The whole floor reeked of smoke until the border was ripped out and now I know why.

New wall!  It’s tough to see in the picture, but the door folds out in the middle and inside is a storage area of the 9 foot wide section between the stairs and the chimney.  This larger section will be for the storage of baseball card stuff.

Almost as import as the storage space is the large sections of vertical walls to hang stuff on.  This room was severely lacking in vertical walls prior to this and that’s something that I wasn’t a big fan of at all.

Here’s the other 9 foot section.  It’s set back from the other wall segment by a foot or so.  This was done to make space for the giant Ikea bookcase that you see in this picture.  The bookcase fits and there’s still a decent amount of storage in the room behind the bookcase.  This smaller storage area will be used mostly for my comic book long boxes.  I think I’ve got around 10 long boxes and 30 half boxes that will need to go in there.  I’ve got lots of bagging and boarding to do as well.

It’s tough getting really good pictures of the room due to the size and shape of it.  Also, all of the large furniture was in the middle of the room during the construction and that prevented good picture taking as well.  As the room comes together, I’ll take pictures of those items and sections of the room to give you a better idea of what the room looks like.  The first thing that I want to get up is my giant pin board, but I need some hardware to hang it.  That thing is pretty heavy.

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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