Reorganization Project Update

A few people have inquired about the reorganization project that I undertook roughly two months ago, so today I am going to walk you through what steps I am taking to improve my collection.  The basic premise of the project is to take my cards, which have been sorted into teams, and resort them into sets.  During this process I am trying to thin out some of my single cards by taking out the mass of doubles and use them as trade bait, or sell them and reinvest the money into quality single cards for my collection or fill the holes in sets which are close to complete.

I have started the project by breaking the 2000 and 2001 from my team boxes and sort them out into sets.  Within each set I break the cards into two piles.  One pile of cards I shape into the set and another pile of cards I shape into a stack of doubles.  It looks something like this:

 
The pile on the left is stack that I set up as the set and the stack on the right is my stack of doubles.  The insert cards within the set, minus relic and autograph cards, are sorted into the bottom of the set pile.  I inventory the set pile to see if I have a complete set and box the set if I do.  If I do not have a complete set I box the cards and mark the box with a sticky note showing the cards that I am missing to complete the set.  The doubles piles have been broken into lots for trade or sale.  In some cases I have two copies of the set which makes it easy to sell or trade.  In other cases I break the the doubles down by player and trade and sell, or just leave it as a partial set.  Either way, I have seen some good returns on the cards that I am taking out of my collection.  The final completed sets are then being stacked up to be placed back into my baseball card closet at the projects completion.

The autographed cards in my collection have also been reorganized slightly.  In the past I had sorted the inserts, relic cards, and autographed cards into boxes.  I have now taken the insert cards and sorted them back into the boxes with their set.  The relic cards are not a huge priority for me, most of the time, so I have sorted those into a set of boxes, and set aside a few hundred which I plan to sell or trade.  I am then taking the autograph cards and scanning the cards to have a picture of each autograph in my collection.

Sorry that my office is a tad bit sunny, but I scan the cards individually where they are then crop the scans and clean up the pictures as best I can.  I do not have the world's best scanner, but I save the pictures of the cards into a folder on my computer.  Cards which are not going to be written up on my blog are posted onto my Facebook page.

Once the cards are scanned and filed on my computer, I physically file the autographed cards away into my card boxes which are exclusively used for autographed cards.  Currently I have the cards in a handful of eight-hundred count boxes, but I plan on putting my autographs into two row shoeboxes once I get a solid handle on the exact number of autographs in my collection.  Currently, I am somewhere in the thousands.

Overall, the project is going well, but is going to take some serious time to complete.  When I started this project in May I was hoping the total process of thinning out and reorganizing my collection would take roughly one year, but I am open to possibly having to spend up to two years on this project.  Looking through my cards and sorting them out has been a blast, but I have underestimated how much time it would take to sort out some of the sets in my collection.