This has led to an interesting dichotomy in my life as I try to continue G.I. Joe related motivations while juggling work, finishing my bachelor’s degree, and deal with living with my in-laws for the next six weeks.  Hit the jump to see how I’m trying to keep myself sane.

As I write this, the family and I are currently between homes.  Our trusty hold one-floor ranch has been sold and we’ve made a commitment to the new house, which currently continues construction, on track for completion at the same exact time that I happen to be in New Orleans at JoeCon 2012.  I really need to work on my timing.

The work on the new home continues full steam ahead, with the majority of external construction complete, and work being done on the inside.  Most of the sheet rocking is up, and as the walls are completed inside, it quickly becomes evident to me that a lot of my “sky is the limit” hopes and dreams aren’t quite as realistic as they appeared when the walls were opened and the final room dimensions weren’t so clearly defined.

Not that this is a bad thing.  Quite the opposite, actually.  I’ve quickly found that the more strict the dimensions of what I can do, the more realistic my expectations become and the firmer my plans start to form mentally.  When my toys were stashed in my garage, the mentality was all about “storage”.  I need enough room in my garage to “store” my stuff, and that took prescedence in a big way.  I have…well… a lot of stuff.  Way too much stuff.  Bordering on a hoarders situation kind of stuff, and when it was in the garage “out of sight, out of mind” it was a matter of digging away enough space in the garage to stack things from floor-to-ceiling in order to properly stash my worldly possessions.  Check out images of my storage unit below.

[View with PicLens]

Now, as I rethink my priorities and start to consider an “inside” situation with a home office and a desire to showcase my collection rather than just store it, I find my mentality changing drastically.  Collecting, for a long time, has been a total “gotta catch ‘em all” mindset, where the main goal was simply accumulation.  Gather as much as humanly possible to maintain my mythical “collection”.  But I have started asking myself some questions…what is the value of a “collection” if it really is just that?  A “Collection”?  Does merely collecting stuff really bring some sort of satisfaction, or is what you do with that stuff much more important?  Personally, I find my attitude shifting.  Don’t get me wrong, I have an immense amount of respect for those folks who can do both…who can collect a massive amount of stuff and do some cool stuff with it (see Kevin Watts), but I’m not in a situation where I can do that.  So now, as I design this room in my head, some hard decisions are starting to form over what I really need.  I have mentally converted already from “storage” to “display” and I’m already considering the best possible way to display my collection in a way that makes it fun and interesting, not just a ridiculous stack of tubs from floor to ceiling.  After all, this room is going to be an office inside my home, and not just a dank garage that nobody ever goes into.  That changes the characteristics of what a toy room should be drastically, in my opinion.

First and foremost, we have the room, almost completely sheet rocked.  You’ll have to excuse the pictures, there is no electricity directly to the home yet, so the pictures were taken in low light with my cell phone camera, but hopefully you can get the idea.

[View with PicLens]

Now, don’t get me wrong, there is quite a bit of room in here.  It’s a 13′ by 14′ space with a ton of wall area.  I will want an office desk in here for my computer, and I need a review station, but besides that, this is all open floor and wall space available for toy display.  But when you’re talking to someone who has a 10′ by 10′ storage area filled top to bottom with tubs of crap, suddenly this room doesn’t seem like sufficient space, which is where the hard decisions will have to come in.

My first series of decisions revolves around my shelf choices.  I’m strongly considering using rails and shelves on the walls in order to best optimize my space, but I would love input from anyone else who uses these methods.  The idea right now, is possibly putting a table with the USS Flagg in the center of the room, as that should leave enough room on each side to walk around, with my action figure cabinets on one wall, and display shelves on the other.  That leaves the far wall for the office desk/review station and the near wall for some other potential space.  But again, my architecture skills aren’t the best, and until I get stuff in the room, I’m betting my internal measurements will be way off.  But you know, part of me doesn’t care if they are.  I am fully resigned to the fact that whatever happens, this room is going to look good, and the focus is going to be on display, not on storage, so no matter what happens from here, things will be sold, and my whole “gotta have them all” mentality is going to be seriously questioned.

For the shelves themselves, I’m taking some inspiration from Destro at HissTank.com who recently posted images of his collection, including the shelving he’s using, and that matches pretty well with what I’ve got in my own head.

[View with PicLens]

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t see myself parting with a lot of my figures.  After all, I’ve got a pretty good system for storage and display for those.  But do I really need half a dozen three foot long vehicles from the late 80′s in my collection?  And as pained as it makes me, do I really need a 7′ Aircraft Carrier that will just sit in the middle of the floor and take up valuable walking or display space for hundreds of other items?

I don’t know if I’m ready to answer that question yet, but the fact that it’s being asked is an eye opening, somewhat life-changing experience for me.  It may be the best thing about this new house purchase.

Stay tuned.

Some posts will be more about my own history, some posts will just be a look at some images.

I’m not sure exactly where I’m going with this, but I figured I’d take this opportunity to try and do something interesting and document the process of my toy room coming together.  Take it or leave it.  Check out Part 1 after the jump.

To give a proper frame of reference for this series I’ll be starting, I need to rewind about 17 or 18 years.  I was around 20 years old and in the midst of my college years, and my mom had purchased a pretty nice new house.  This new house gave me an entire top floor to myself as one huge bedroom of sorts.  Essentially I had carte blanche to go “toy crazy” on display.  And I kind of did.

During these days, G.I. Joe quietly exited from retail shelves and I was more into the Spawn and Toy Biz stuff. I worked full time at K-B Toys when I wasn’t in school, and I had all of the disposable income I wanted.  Back then there was no thought about student loans, car payments (mine was inherited from my grandmother), or rent.  I made some decent cash at the toy store, and my mom seemed content to have me around when I wasn’t in school, so life was good.

Fast forward about 3 years…  while living in this home I met a girl and we got along pretty well, in spite of an entire top floor full of children’s toys.  She was just graduating from college and about to head to law school, and we decided that I would go with her down to Springfield, Massachusetts.  Her student loans afforded us a “cost of living” allotment, so even though I was leaving a job I loved, we felt pretty good about things down there.  But of course, we were moving into a pretty small apartment.  I felt content to leave my Spawn, my Toy Biz, and even my Star Wars figures behind, really not feeling a deep emotional attachment to them at that very moment.

While in Springfield, my whole G.I. Joe identity changed, almost over night.  It probably sounds over-dramatic, but while living down in that area, I became intensely interested again in G.I. Joe, finding myself combing trough eBay listings over dial up and traveling back to my mother’s house to go through the attic-filled refuge and drool over the classic Joes contained within.  I have vivid memories of stopping by my small apartment right after my wedding in the summer of 2000 and looking at images of San Diego ComicCon on my small color monitor.  They had done it.  G.I. Joe was coming back to mainstream retail in the form of the Real American Hero Collection, and I left on my honeymoon, boring my wife with talk of a forest camouflaged Firefly and someone named General “Toma”hawk.  She must have forgiven me for talking about that stuff on our way to the Poconos, considering I sit here almost 12 years later and we’re still married.

Yes my toy attention was driven back towards G.I. Joe in a powerful way the rest of that year, but none moreso then when I made my normal stop at a local Toys “R” Us and found the new Real American Hero Collection figures on store shelves.  Here I sit, at least 65 miles from any real retail outlets now, but back in 2000, I was the first person nationally (at least in the relatively small internet community that was in place at that time) to find these G.I. Joe figures.  That fact motivated me to post the reviews (using a new fangled digital camera my wife and I had asked for as a wedding gift) and really kick-start my sweet Angelfire website at the time.

Fast forward again, and my wife has graduated Law School, and we’re back up here in bear country, renting the top floor of a house.  This top floor contained a very large 3-Season porch which was somewhat uninhabitable 6 months out of the year, so it became my decent sized toy room.  Finally, I had a place to store my precious G.I. Joe figures.  And I stored them.  And displayed them.  And went pretty nutty with it.  Shelves, cabinets, a little aircraft carrier.  Good times.

So, as time goes on, we decide the time has come where renting isn’t something we want to do long term, and we decide to buy a house.  It’s an okay house, nothing glamorous, but it has three bed rooms.  I immediately stake claim to one of them and again have a great display going on with shelves of my stuff, and even get some stuff leaking out into bedroom #3, which was more or less our office.  Life was still good.

Then came Megan.  Born in 2005, literally a week before Sigma 6 emerged (yes I really do measure my milestones by G.I. Joe events.  Please tell me that’s not pathetic).  We had cleared out that bedroom of my toys and moved many of them to the garage, but I still had bedroom #3, which became a Sigma 6 shrine.  Transformers and other toys ended up there as well, but primarily it was those 8″ beauties that encompassed all of my time in those years.

Then came Allison.  Born in 2009 (just a month after G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, yeah, yeah, I know, shaddup), it was now obvious that all of Daddy’s toys were going to be forever relegated to the garage.  The dirty garage.  The unheated garage. The bane of my collector existence…  the friggen GARAGE.

So now it’s late 2011.  Megan is 6 and Allie is 2.  They’re the highlights of my life, and I love them as I try desperately not to secretly resent their very existence because my toys are now in the damn garage.  It’s late 2011 as my wife and I sit, exhausted after long work days and look at the house, with kid’s toys spilling out of every nook and cranny of our living room, with no place to put them in either child’s bedroom, and the strong realization comes.  My wife looks over to me slowly and says those fateful words I’ve been waiting to hear for 2 years…

“We need a bigger house”.

I’m pretty sure trumpets actually played in the background, and I may have actually done handsprings across the living room floor, I’m not sure.  Regardless, the decision was made then and there.  A For Sale sign hit our front lawn a week later, and we were house hunting.  To say the process was painful would be a gross understatement.  We had our house sold in January, but the buyer’s financing fell through.  We had almost a dozen showings, half of them “very positive” but no sniffs.

Finally… FINALLY…in April, almost six months after listing the house, we got an offer we could live with.  The only problem?  We hadn’t found a house we liked.  So at this point the pressure was on a bit, and we continued our house hunting in more earnest.  When the listing came through of a house still under construction in a nearby town we were mildly interested.  It seemed to have everything we wanted.  Plenty of bedrooms, plenty of living space, a full fledged basement for storage…and an office.  A dedicated basement-level office space.  JUST FOR ME.  With no more kids on the way (barring some sort of surgical mishap) this room would be MINE DAMMIT ALL MINE.

Here’s the next problem.  It ain’t built yet.

So, me being the shameless attention whore that I am, I figured ‘hey!  I can use this!”  I know there is often a lot of interest among the online fandom to see other toy rooms, but how often to you actually get to see the creation of a toy room?  Not just assembled shelving, but the entire toy room itself, completely built, from cement to sheet rock?  That doesn’t happen very often.  Well, it’s going to happen now.

From here on I’ll be posting updates on a semi-regular basis, just reporting on the status of the new toy room.  Obviously at some stages of construction things will move along rapidly, while at other times there won’t be much to say.  But regardless, I thought this might be a fun exercise.

Now I do all this with the distinct possibility that I’ll be crushingly disappointed along the way.  While everything is pretty much finalized with both houses, we have not 100% closed on our existing house, and if anything goes wrong between now and then, the whole thing could fall apart.  But according to our realtor, we’ve jumped over all major hurdles.

So for the first entry, we have some pictures very early in the construction process.  It likely won’t make much sense, but I think it will still be cool to watch the whole thing come together.  Hopefully you agree.

And as far as using G.I. Joe events to measure major milestones… we close on the new house June 26th.  The day before I leave for JoeCon, 2012.

Aw, hell.

[View with PicLens]

It’s 9:30am and my kids have already ransacked the living room twice, eaten too much chocolate and have been awake for almost 4 hours.  But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Enjoy the holiday and have a great Easter Sunday.

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I upgraded it, intending to get it more current with reviews, interviews, and links to the DVD Pre-Order, and I still plan on doing that after I can get the coding worked out.

Thanks for your patience.