While I was on my blogging hiatus back in the fall and early winter, one of my goals before the baby was born was to finally get my collection organized in a decent manner. The fact that it wasn't organized completely drove me nuts. I tried binders but that got too expensive having to buy pages and the binder itself. Finally, I finally just said "forget this" and I bought five 3200 count boxes to go with one I already had from the card shop. Over the course of two weeks, I emptied the binders organized the cards by team, and started loading them into the boxes. As you can see by the picture above, I filled up all five.
I took a bunch of top loaders I had laying around and used them as dividers. I bought a pack of cheap index cards to use as labels and I cut them to fit in the top loaders. Once I finished sorting everything, I labeled the boxes on the front as to what's in them. I'm pretty pleased with the way I turned out, although I've got one extra 3200 count box and in order to get some extra room, I'm going to split the teams up into American and National League and have two boxes for each league.
For my Reds cards, I sorted them by decade (80s, 90s, etc.) into their own box for easy sorting and the ability to quickly go through them at a later date to pull out duplicates and cards for my player collections, which might get put into a binder at a later date.
For my non-baseball cards (hockey, football, wrestling, etc.), I managed to get them all into one box with room to spare. The hockey cards are again split up by team, football are split by Bengals and "other", wrestling and UFC cards have their own row, and miscellaneous stuff has some space as well.
Here's my trade box. It's a 1600 count shoebox style box. Again, I used top loaders and index cards for dividers. Although you can't see it, underneath each person's name is a brief summary of what they collect so I can quickly reference it without getting out my master list. The empty space in the box is usually occupied by a Ziploc bag that has cut up binder pages in it that I use for PWEs and a print out of my "trader address book" with everyone's addresses.
That's the majority of my collection organized. There's a few more minor things I have to work on such as sorting and paging up some sets and going through the handful of cards I have in storage in the garage. I'm really happy that I was able to get everything organized mostly and there is a semblance of order with everything..
