So this weekend it was time to try and make the Mancave a little more usable. Recently, and especially since my month off, it has been more of a dumping ground for geekery and little to no room for actually gaming etc. So Lucy and I set about making some space in there and re-organising.
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- The IKEA Kallax Storage Unit – the gaming geeks best friend.
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- The Ikea Detolf Display Cabinets.
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- Need more Display Cabinets for these guys!
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- The Collective and Resistance is Futile Prizes.
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- The Dominion War OP prizes (left), Indy retail ships, Cloaked Ships from Gencon, Episodic Event OP Prizes (right).
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- Klingon, Federation retail ships (top) and Romulan, Dominion retail ships (bottom).
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- The Collective OP Prizes (top) and Dominion War OP Prizes (Bottom).
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- Resistance is Futile OP Prizes (top) and Indy retail ships, Cloaked Ships from GenCon, Episodic event OP prizes (bottom).
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- Borg, Vulcans, Mirror Universe, Ferengi, Kazon, Species 8472 and Bajoran retail ships (top) and some sneaky Star Wars X-Wing stuff plus two sets of GenCon Cloaked Ships (bottom).
We mainly use Ikea furniture to display and organise the geekery in the Mancave. Kallax storage units make great shelving and are robust and sturdy so can handly a lot of usage. The Detolf Display Cabinets are cheap (only £40), easy to build and look quite swish however there is a lot of dead space within them. With only 3 shelves you could easily fit another 4 shelves in each doubling the storage capacity. Recently I’ve been struggling to get all my Star Trek Attack Wing ships into the two Detolf Display Cabinets so now they have moved I think Im going to have to look into modding these units to carry more ships.
After some searching around I found a forum which had a nice “how-to” for modding the shelves:-
Armed with this information I trawled EBay to find some 3/16″ Wire Rope Clips. Happy with my purchase (I needed 32 but got three packs of 12) I now need to find a local glazier to cut me some sheets of glass for shelves. I’ve measured up and reckon 8 off (15 1/2″ x 11 1/4″ x 1/8″) with a pencil grind edge should do the trick. Just need to find a decent and cheap source for them.
We removed a lot of the books, cookery and baking that had been occupying space on my shelves and stored them in the loft. This freed up a lot of space to put more games onto the shelves, so the two copies of Star Wars Armada and the copy of Star Wars Imperial Assault found new homes along with some older games that hadn;t been unpacked from the move until this point; War on Terror, Apples to Apples, Skyline 3000, The LOGO Game, Key to the Kingdom and an old copy of Necromunda I had kicking around.
Other related projects include finishing off my folding 4’x4′ gaming table. I got one half made before bad weather set in last summer so I had better get on with that as soon as I have a free weekend. You can see part of it lurking on the left of the picture of the Kallax Storage Unit above.
I’m also going to try and get a semi permanent painting station set-up for me so painting becomes less of a chore and I’ll be able to jump in and out of painting a lot easier.
The Star Trek CCG cards need sorting too. They’ve not really been unpacked since we moved from the ‘Nam to Coventry. I’d like to be able to get back into the CCG scene and complete my collection. Im only missing The Motion Pictures (TMP) and All Good Things (AGT) sets. They’re still astronomically expensive and very difficult to find for retail anywhere near me. Sadly I think I’m going to have to abandon my idea for a huge picture displaying a full set as the frame cost is prohibitive and I’m a little short on wall space. It would have been an ace picture to put up displaying 363 black bordered rare cards but at over 2m long by over 1m tall its not a small undertaking. Even tweaking the numbers I still cant get it much smaller than over 1.8m by just under 1.4m. Such a shame!
talesfromthemancave 