Card Room and Card Barrel Open for Business

Some of you might remember that my wife and I bought a new house in July. It's not a new home by any means; in fact, it's a 25-year-old house that had most of the original everything in it when we moved in, all in a state of disrepair. But because of the location, the sentimental value (my father-in-law built that house himself), and the discounted price mixed with the belief we could take on the projects ourselves, we made a move for the house and ended up with it. We spent most of the end of summer into the fall working on various projects that we had planned.

 

One of the exciting things about this house was that I was able to get a card room. Well, it's more of a "hobby" room, because my cards are sharing it with my wife's sewing. After nearly six months, I finally have it set up how I want it.

 

This isn't exactly everything; there are some complete set binders without a need for frequent access that are in my closet because they don't fit in here. The empty shelves (and the half of the counter I didn't photograph) are for my wife's sewing materials, as we are sharing this hobby room. But I'm excited to have a card room for the first time in my life.

 

It took much longer for me to get to the hobby room because I was working on all the renovation projects first. And there's always something that isn't planned, isn't there? For us, it was the master bathroom. When we moved in, there was a gigantic jetted tub in the master bathroom. It wasn't exactly what we wanted, but we didn't really consider changing it out because we didn't feel it was as necessary as other things. During the first week, however, we realized we couldn't keep it. Like so many other things in the house, it didn't work. The cold water valve was broken and the jets wouldn't turn on. It was literally impossible to clean properly, and it desperately needed to be cleaned. When we got estimates on the cost for making it functional, we realized that it didn't make any pecuniary sense to fix it because that alone was about half the cost of a remodel. Why not just bite the bullet, take the time, and remake the bathroom into something that we actually wanted?

Just a couple of weeks ago, I finally finished the bathroom remodel, which I did pretty much on my own. Here is what it looked like then:

Here is what it looks like now:

It's hard to believe that the entire space you see here was taken up by one tub.

Now that the card room is up and running, I made a trip to the Card Barrel. I used my Card Barrel purchase to hit a number of random needs.

Some of the cards I picked up for my new All-Star Frankenset.

In fact, that was what made up about half of the order. The other half was filling in gaps in my Rookie of the Year collection. I won't show the ROY cards because I plan to run a series that will let you see that collection later. While browsing the Card Barrel, I picked out some cards from sets that I've always liked but never really collected. Like 1995 Emotion. This is a pretty nice set, but I don't think I ever bought any baseball Emotion back in the day. I'm not going to build the set, but I'll pick up some former all-stars.

The same goes for Zenith. I put together the 1997 Zenith football set, but I didn't really have any baseball from any year. So I got some for my All-Star collection.

Now that I have myself organized, I'll be looking to be disorganized again. Meaning, it's time for some more acquisitions to fill that desk while I catalog, sort, and put away cards. There's also room on the counter for pulling out cards to send to other people. I've been pretty quiet in TCDB trades for the past few months, but I'm looking to pick up the pace now.