The Move

I never realized how many figures I had until I had to move my collection. Aside from the nearly 400 Transformers I had on display in the garage, I also had nearly 300 G.I. Joes all of which were 25th Anniversary through 30th Anniversary with the exception of the movie figures. I've just never like the movie designs or sculpts. At any rate, I had to find a way to fit nearly 700 figures into my bedroom's sitting room so my wife could use the garage as a workspace for her furniture restoration business.

The master bedroom is huge; I've seen smaller living rooms. At the front of the bedroom is a sitting room and then the actual bedroom is sunken in. It's rather nice. There's a master bathroom of course in the bedroom and a built in vanity to go along with a walk-in closet and a regular closet. Huge. The sitting area has a built in desk with a built in bookcase over that. I had already started using that as a space for my Masterpiece and Binaltech figures. The desk was cleared of the computer since I had made the switch to using laptops a few years ago. I don't program or anything anymore, so the desktop computer wasn't needed.

Clearing out the desktop gave me room for Fort Max, Scorponok and Countdown, but that was about it. Since I was moving everything out of the garage, I was able to take the fast track I had hung in the garage down. Well, two of the three fast tracks. The middle one was in there pretty good. Not one of the screws would budge from the middle track. But I still had plenty of shelves hanging on the walls in the garage that I could use.

The first thing I decided to do was move my G.I. Joes because, quite frankly, I knew it would be a pain. Having to pose all those guys all over again was not going to be fun. I don't like the stands that come with the figures because I can't do any kind of dynamic posing with those things. That makes whatever shelf they're on extremely volatile. One funny look starts a domino effect.

I used some sort of cubed curio case that my wife found for the vast majority of my Cobra forces. B.A.T.S, Vipers, all the special forces and the vehicles I had for them. It worked out pretty well and it gave a better look than what I had in the garage. The very top went to the Joe vehicles I had.

So that left me with a need for my actual Joes. At this point, I made a hard decision. One of the great things, on Hasbro's end anyway, is that there are tons of variations on each figure. For me, it was nerve wracking. I decided to just display my favorite version of each Joe that I had and put the rest in storage, which sucks because I'm a firm believer in displaying everything. I also decided to do this with some of my Cobra figures like Destro, the Baroness and Storm Shadow.

So up they went on a shelf. Above that shelf, more Cobras. It looks nice. Still, this is a blog about Transformers, not G.I. Joe, so that's it for Joe talk.

The shelves that I had on the fast tracks in the garage were 6 feet long. I also had a few other shelves plus a workspace that I kept my bases on. This wouldn't work in the sitting area. The first wall had a window and then the Joes filled up what space was remaining there. That left one wall.

The wall I had to use measured 55 inches, meaning I had to cut each shelf shelf 17 inches. Space was going to be tight, but somehow I had managed to make enough room to add an extra shelf to the fast track. Bonus. It wasn't until after I had put all of the shelves in place, screwed them to the brackets and added everyone that I noticed that the fast tracks were a little off. I measured everything before hanging and used a laser level. Turns out my house is kind of leaning. That was a bummer. I should have used the laser level at multiple points to find that out beforehand. I managed to make a few corrections to offset the slope some, but I still notice it.

Even after adding the extra shelf, I still didn't have enough room. To help out, I built two shelves in an "L" shape to hug the corner of a wall. Here I placed my Seekers one the top shelf and my gestalts minus Predaking because of his weight and my Dinobots. All of my shelves were filled and I still had about 100 figures left to display. Hrm...

This led me to another difficult decision. I boxed up all of my Joes, a few Cobras, and some vehicles. That freed up the two smaller shelves, which helped out tremendously with the most important thing - my Transformers. On those shelves went my Blasters/Twincasts, Soundwave/Soundblasters and their cassettes and all of the Autobot cars.

I think for the space that I was able to use, I did ok. My non G1 figures that I had went into storage (shelf in my closet) until I can figure out how I can display them. Which also means that my collection will stay pretty steady in size for the moment until I can work out this space thing. There's still MP Sideswipe, Red Alert, Soundwave, TFCC Shattered Glass VSE set and MP Thundercracker (should I ever actually find one!) to get shelf space for. This setup will probably change multiple times over the next few weeks. I just have to find a way to get everything displayed.