Thanks to the inspiration of The Junior Junkie, I finally set up my card room/office!

Technically I've had a office/card room/whatever for a few years now, but I could never get it to feel like a room I liked to be in.  So it mostly acted as a cat bedroom (I called it "The Cattery," and I spent most of my office/card time downstairs while this room stood vacant.

Then I saw The Junior Junkie's card room post recently, and I told myself that I needed to finally make something of this upstairs room - It was long overdue.  So for the last week of Summer vacation, I threw some stuff together that I found around the house and ended up with a room that I'm actually pretty proud of, especially since it costs me $0 in supplies since it was all stuff I had around the house!

Here's the main wall in its entirety, featuring my desk and some hanging shelves that were in the kitchen when we first moved in:

The "desk" on the bottom is actually an IKEA bureau system that we grabbed a while back.  The right side still has the three bureau drawers in it, but I cut all the ones on the left out.  Originally this made the desk wobbly, and stupid me just dealt with the wobbliness for a few years before realizing I could stabilize it by mounting it to the wall in a few places.  So now it's way more secure.

The little shelf thingy on the right (with candles and bobbleheads in it) is this weird VHS holder I made a year ago out of the drawers I cut from the IKEA bureau.  It was on the floor and looked pretty awful, and my wife hated it, so it was kind of nifty when it fit perfectly on the desk as a little organizer of sorts!

I like the hanging shelves most of all.  As I said my VHS were all just in that little shelf on the right before, stacked nearly to the ceiling.  I think they look a lot more awesome over the desk, and it also gives me some space to put some cards and other memorabilia, as I'll show more in the next few pics.

The middle of the right shelf has the Brandon Phillips giveaway mini bat that my wife and I grabbed at a Reds game a few years back:

It's backed by six movies I've actually never seen.  I have owned a ton of VHS for a while, but we got like 30 for free through a neighborhood website a little while back, which was kind of cool!

I put my autographed baseballs on the shelf too - one is my Josh Hutcherson/Jose Lopez ball, the other is from my 2nd year of Little League baseball, which featured the best three coaches of all time:

I may be one of the few people in the world who owns both Buried Alive 1 and Buried Alive 2.  I LOVED those movies growing up and would watch them whenever they came on TV, though the first one is definitely a lot better.

On the far left of the hanging shelves, I put this cool print my wife got for me and my Brayan Peña plates on top of some tapes:

Nice little VHS selection here - Incubus is the weird Esperanto movie with William Shatner, and it's pretty fun.  I'm also a sucker for 80's and 90's horror/thrillers, which is why you see stuff like Fade to Black, The Faculty, and Disturbing Behavior,

My Choo plates are on the far right of the shelves, showing a lot of glare here:

A few classic VHSs here, and some underrated classics too.  And then there's "All Over the Guy."  That was in the free 30 VHS we got, and it's a pretty terrible movie in case you were wondering.

Here's a slightly jarring view from the side of the desk and shelves - you can see my terrible building job on those lower shelves - LOTS OF NAILS!

The wall adjacent to the desk and shelving area is fairly bare right now, and eventually I want to fill it with lots of pictures and maybe some records.  For now it just has two paintings I made with my wife at one of those Wine and Canvas things, as well as our record player:

The record player came from my father-in-law, and it's pretty excellent.  He threw in some of his records too, and I think I've already played Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush" half to death.  My collection is pretty small for now, but I'm starting to check our two local stores more often now, so hopefully that bottom part will get filled up quite a bit more over time!

If you keep going left from that picture, you get a weird group of stuff:

Most of this stuff was here when the room was more just for cats.  The boxes are the cats'  favorite thing, as they sit on them and climb on them and sleep in them all the time.  We figured we'd add the hanging door thing too to keep their interest but they never really used it until I finished the room and actually came up here to work on school things.  Now my one cat can't get enough of it.  

In fact, she even came upstairs and hung out on top while I was photographing for this post:

Here's a close-up of the non-cat stuff in the corner area:

The bottom left is my signed picture of Maddux and Glavine - my Dad got it for me many years back, and it's definitely one of my coolest pieces of memorabilia.  The middle painting is from another wine and canvas, and then the picture on the right is this watercolor that a coworker got for me last Christmas.  It's three cats chilling, which is perfect for us since we have three cats!

And then the lacrosse stick head top left is the head I used in high school/college.  I use all my other sticks now as I actually started coaching youth lacrosse, but this one is all holes and tears so it's cool to just have as a wall piece.

If you keep going left, you get to our staircase, where one of my other cats was waiting as I kept taking pictures:

These cats are everywhere - Luckily I'm a cat guy!

Finally, the last wall, which is just left of the cat in that last photo, holds a built-in bookshelf that came with the house.  My wife originally used it for books, but as I took over the room it became more and more of a card area:

The top shelf houses a small portion of my Ice Cat collection.  A few autos, a few game used pucks, and my Bryce Salvador OYO:

Shelf 2 is a ton of Reds bobbleheads and then a few key cards with Corinthian Headliners.  I really like the McGriff autograph framed by two McGriff Headliners:

Third shelf down is a few of my best Seneca Wallace cards in front of some books.  If any of you guys like fantasy baseball a lot, I think "Fantasyland" is a pretty fun read:

4th of 5 shelves is patch heavy.  I really like being able to pair headliners with their cards, so I have my Barry Sanders Headliner with his patch and then Greg Maddux with his patch as well.  Shame there wasn't a Pedro Headliner.

And then finally we come to the last shelf, which is N64 and SNES games.  If I ever find more hanging shelves I like, these may move upward like my VHS.  Some day I want to own a ton of old N64/SNES/NES games, kind of like the Angry Video Game Nerd does:

So that, in a nutshell, is my card room/office!  I'm so glad I finally got the inspiration to set it up, as I now work in the room every day whereas before it was maybe once or twice a month.  And since I don't have any impending babies like the Junkie, I'll have this great place to myself for the forseeable future - ought to be nice!