When You Run Out of Room, Find a Better Shelf

Shelving... Not good!!

At some point, I tire of Tetris.

I recently walked upstairs into the frog (Family Room Over Garage) at my house to put some new games away, and I realized something: I am out of space. You see, my double Kallax was overflowing - and worse, my overflow shelf was overflowing. I had more games in hand, and I have more games coming, so I knew this was going to become a big problem fairly soon. My Nerd Cave, as my wife calls it, has never been the best as far as storage goes, simply because I can't ever figure out how to get Kallax shelving to store my games well. There is either a gap that lets the boxes come open a bit and create a massive mess out of the components, or there isn't quite enough space and I have to rearrange different cubes to get the games to fit the way I need them to. Honestly, this was getting frustrating, as I never seemed to be able to get things to fit the way I want.

Beyond this, I have reached the point in my collection where games are stacked on top of the Kallaxes, on top of an old TV stand that I moved upstairs as an overflow shelf and also on top of the only table upstairs, which I have long used as my gaming table / miniatures building table. In other words, nothing up there works any longer. I have gotten more and more concerned about this situation as I have gone longer and longer with everything arranged this way - I keep finding games that have come open just enough to make the contents a mess, and I'm concerned that at some point it will genuinely damage some of the game components. My other concern is that, as I keep getting more and more games, I won't be able to stack them without causing damage to the game boxes.

Overflow?

My overflow shelves down there are... insufficient

You might think, "well Josh, why don't you just cull your collection? That's way more games than you need". You would be right - there is absolutely no way that I ever play all of these games as many times as I would like to. In fact, there are almost definitely games sitting on my shelf right now that will literally never be opened by me again. But you know what? I'm okay with that.

I have two children currently, I have a family that loves games and I am a member of a vibrant church community filled with fellow gamers and nerds. I may not ever play these games again, but as the person with the biggest collection in our circles, I have made it abundantly clear to everyone that my library is open. Anyone we know can check games out and borrow whatever they would like, with a few exceptions like Magic: The Gathering. Essentially, while I may never play these games, someone who I know or one of my kids may be interested and want to take them for a spin. I've had my fun with all of them (well, almost... I do have a shelf of shame, but let's not discuss that right now), and now I'm willing to allow them to languish until they find the right individual to play them again.

This means, however, finding storage. I love my games, I love them on display and I love the look on people's faces when they walk into the room and see what a game room looks like. Currently, I take almost no one upstairs to look around my game room, because it has become such a disaster. There is no organization any longer, and it's reached the point where I sometimes don't even pull out games I want to play because I don't want to try to figure out how to fit those games back where they belong after playing them.

stack

In some cases, I don't even touch the bottom games... too much work.

One of my other issues that got me looking for answers was that I noticed some games, like Tulikko, are getting scuffed on their corners and edges. If it's between storing them all or getting rid of them, I would of course pick having the slightly scuffed, slightly messy boxes... but I don't think that has to be the only choice. I think there has to be a way to arrange and organize my storage and have a better setup for my game room as a whole. I truly love my game room, but it's frustrating when it feels like it's always messy, and not because of my own slovenliness.

So that's when I started looking for solutions. In the next part, I will talk through all the options I have looked into, and why I ended up choosing BoxKing and decided to reach out to them.

Check out my blog for Part II .

Originally published by Josh B (@Skello496) on BoardGameGeek: “When You Run Out of Room, Find a Better Shelf.”

Republished on BoxKing Gaming with the author’s permission.