My Great Reorganizing Project

I have now been collecting baseball cards for thirty years and over that time accumulated a pretty large collection.  I've posted a few pictures here and there of large groupings of cards on my Facebook and Twitter pages, but not really done very much of that on my blog page.  Instead, I have mainly focused on nice single cards, mainly autographs and relics, that are drifting into my collection.  I also spend a pretty good amount of time collecting sets.  I've alluded to that several times over my past year of blogging in my both 30 Year Top 50 posts, and more recently I started a thread of posts about sets I am completing.  Note that there are only two completed sets.  Not doing so well on that goal, which is why we are here today.  

I am not much to sit back and not take action when action is needed.  I started collecting baseball cards when I was 6 years old.  Thirty years later my collection has changed greatly in size and quality, but there is one thing that still remains the same: how I sort out my cards.  I dabbled with going alphabetically by player sometime in middle school, but that was a short lived experiment.  After college, I also dabbled with creating notebooks of star players and keeping their cards separated out from the rest of my cards.

So, here's how the system works.  I sort the cards into teams.  Within each team the cards are sorted out into year, then into sets.  If you asked me to go find a specific card I could do it in a few minutes which is pretty cool considering I am pretty close to 300,000 cards in my collection.  However, I feel like I've lost touch with some of my sets and I have so much volume at this point I am not going to complain if my collection loses a few dupes.  Here's what my collection generally looks like in it's home:

So, in going through my cards to figure out which sets I have completed and not completed I am literally having to go through thirty different boxes to figure out that I am missing five cards from a set.  That's a lot of work for five cards.  That's where the change is coming into place.  I have decided to take my cards and break them back into their set form.  I can still have easy access to cards and quickly reference to see what is, and what is not, in my collection.  The task is going to be daunting considering that there are thirty years of cards and a few hundred thousand cards in this closet.  I started two weeks ago and decided to just work with my 2001 cards.  

It took about an hour to go through all thirty teams and pull out my cards from 2001.  Since they are sorted into sets within the teams the process of stacking up each set was not very difficult.  The hardest part was going through the sets and sorting them into numerical order to figure out which sets are complete and which sets are short.  In some cases I had sets that I opened two or three packs of and never bothered to go any further.  In all, I spent time in 2001 collecting about 35 different sets.  Most were put together through wax boxes that I busted.  Here's a closer look at the sets from above.  

I now have a few sets that I can post as being completed, not sure if I will or not, but more importantly this gave me a chance to find a couple of good projects to work on and complete for my sets project that I have been talking about the past few months.  Many of the sets that are close to complete are only missing ten or less cards.  In fact, I counted five sets out of the thirty-five that fit that description.  Tomorrow, I am going to take a little bit of time to share my first project out of this group of cards.  I am also going to have to find something to do with all of the dupes that I have pulled out of my cards collection while putting together all of these sets.  For 2001, I am up to a few thousand dupes.  Any ideas?