My Great Reorganization Project at 20 Months

At some point during March of 2013 I cam up with the idea of reorganizing my cards into sets.  I am a set collector, along with loads of other things, and have basically just sorted my cards the same way forever, because, well that's how I sort my cards.  They sat on a table, usually my desk, until I had completed the set (sometimes just came close) and then were broken into stacks by team and sorted into boxes.

My boxes were organized by team and within the team boxes the cards were kept sequentially by year and then alphabetically by set name within each year.  It was not a bad was to go, but it seemed a little archaic for a person who is really interested in complete sets.  My boxes were often loaded with duplicates and unfinished sets went unfinished.  It all looked very neat from the outside.  This is where we started.....

That the majority of my 250,000ish card collection that started this process.  Along the way I have not offered too many updates, but probably should have done a few more.  It's been a lot more difficult task then I could have ever imagined.  Honestly, I am thinking that breaking all 31 years worth of cards into sets is likely going to end up being a five year project.  Here is a little peak into what I have done......

I have lots and lots of new boxes hanging out in my card room.  These are actually some of the 2001 and 2000 baseball card sets which were featured in my original post.  I have spent a lot of time breaking out years from my team boxes, sorting them out into the sets, and then organizing the cards. Along the way I also break out the inserts, sort them into the boxes with the sets at the end, and remove the duplicates.

In all, I have right at 200 sets assembled and boxed over the last 20 months.  Considering I work a full time job, have a four year old son, and a wife I am doing really well with this project.  Those 200 sets cover 2000, 2001, 2002, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014.  That's 7 years out of 31.  I know that I will have less quantity as I work my way through the late 90s and get back into the early 90s and 80s sets.  The may be bigger sets, but I think that 2 or 3 big sets will be far less work than all of the little modern sets.

Actually the hardest part of the process has been working with the duplicates.  I have had some luck trading off player lots, or team lots to some collectors, but I have a high volume of dupes.  If you follow my blog on some of the social media sites outside of Blogger I have posted a few pictures over the past year and half showing some of the stacks of cards that are created at times sorting out boxes of cards.

This is the top of a stack of cards.  A view from the sides of my duplicates mountain......

I still have more duplicates that I need to move onto a new home and will surely add a great deal to this stack.  I have also toyed around with video blog posts before on sets, but have not done them very consistently.  Might have to make those a regular weekly post.  Maybe.

So, at this point I still have a lot of work ahead of me with getting my cards broken down into sets.  It's been an enjoyable process and I have had a great time looking back through all of my cards.  There were always favorites, but I have found several sets along the way which I had not seen in several years.