The Cave: Revealed!!!

For sooo long I've been waiting to have a nice space to sit in and admire my bizarre assortment of things. And my wife has been waiting for the same amount of time, because it means my action figures won't be staining the atmosphere of the rest of our home. I've been waiting, and waiting... and now it's finally here!!! The day when I finally draw back the veil and reveal to you the Great Goodwill Geek Cave of Awesomeness!!! Okay, so really it's just the room where I keep all my crap out of everyone else's way... but it's all mine, and it's where I keep the things that I look at to make me feel sane in this world of stress and work and mortgage payments, etc. etc. It was one of my goals in moving to not only have separate rooms for the kids, and a big bedroom for my wife and I... but for my wife and I to also have our own separate spaces to do our own things. So she got a craft room and I got... this:

Here are two wide shots of the room, from one end to the other. Be careful... look too long and blindness due to the sheer, unadulterated awesome radiating from these images may occur. This top shot shows off the 'library' portion of the room (or at least most of it...) and about 85% of my current toy collection. 

This bottom shows off the "office" portion of the room, with a few (okay a metric ton) more books and toys on display. What is not pictured is the huge, piled collection of boxes containing hidden Christmas toys for the kids that I had to keep moving so they wouldn't be in these pictures, or the pictures to follow. 

See more close-up shots of the cave after the jump!

I'll start with the desk area. Here is my area to write or to (more likely) stare off into space... or at all the beautiful toys surrounding me. 

I bought the desk at Goodwill for 12.99. It is a high school teacher-style desk and it weighs more than a pile of concrete blocks of roughly the same shape and size. It was a bitch to move into the house, but it is a truly excellent desk, and since the fridge in our new house is non-magnetic, it serves as the display space for all my many, many magnets. 

It also serves as even more display space for my toy collection. If this pic looks familiar... it should. A cropped version was in my League post for this week for "Shelf-Expression". 

Here's a shelf I plan to feature a bit more in the future. It's a knick-knack shelf that contains the strange and varied detritus left over from all the many, many Goodwill Grab-Bags I've picked up. Plus... old items that I've found, used to own, or my kids used to own... and I decided to give a new home to. But this is really a paean to the toys that end up at the bottom of the toy-box. Also featured here are some of my favorite packaged PEZ dispensers and Hotwheels. 

Here's the shelf where I keep my absolute favorite books, crowned by a row of packaged toys I feel the need to display. Among my most favorite items here are my Hannukah Dreidel Man, and an Albino Knock-Off Darth Vader figure. Some of my favorite books may surprise you, and some of them may not. There wasn't room enough for Clive Barker's The Great and Secret Show or Stephen King's IT and The Talisman (with Straub). 

I've shown this corner of the room before, when it was slightly less... full. As you can see there are now more books and toys than there were before. 

The Graphic novel collection. There is a steadily increasing percentage of these that I have picked up at Goodwill. With a few notable exceptions, it's practically the only place I still buy TPB's from. You can alos see my Star Wars, Marvel, DC, and Nintendo PEZ and KLIK candy dispenser collection. There's the trickle-down of the TMNT collection from above as well. 

Here's the shelf where I keep larger size books that I just don't have any other shelf space for. If I actually need to get to any of these books out to read them... I have a huge amount of unstacking and restacking to do. Also notice my sweet-ass steam-punk skull jack-o-lantern thing from years ago... and my collection of chibi Marvel party cups. There's a stack of vintage Beatles albums there you can't see from this angle as well. 

Here is a huge part of the library, and most of my vintage action figure collection, among other toys. 

Top to bottom we have books, Real Ghostbuster toys, both vintage action figures and the recent mini-mates series. Next shelf down we have more books, a handful of the 2002 Four Horseman Masters of the Universe redesigns, and a collection of vintage MotU figures. In front of those on the same shelf are my Monster in My Pocket figures, some other assorted mini figures such as Construx, Dino Riders, Adventure People, Battle Beasts, among others. Then some M.U.S.C.L.E. Things at the other end. The bottom shelf features more books, my Thundercats toys, my GIJoe Combat Heroes, and an assortment of other classic action figures like Batman, Swamp Thing, Voltron, Beetlejuice, Mork, and many more. 

Here's a shot of the shelf below, with more books, and even more toys. This time featured are some Star Wars toys, Spongebob toys, Kung Fu Panda miniatures, and just some random stuff. 

This shot features some more of my PEZ dispensers (this isn't even MOST of them. The rest are all in storage because I STILL just don't have enough room for them all...) more books, more Kung Fu Panda toys, and a pile of stuffed animals that all have sentimental value to me. I couldn't bear to pack them away because most of them were either given to me by my wife and kids, or belonged to family members I've lost. 

The two GIJoe jets there are going to be mounted on the wall in the corner above. You can see my five long boxes in the corner (there will probably never be more because I've pretty much given up on collecting single issues of comic altogether... but I might add one more just to make an even six, and leave room for Goodwill and flea market/yard sale acquisitions. I still have another six long boxes at our old place's basement, waiting for me to decide what the hell I'm going to do with them. These five are the ones I've decided I can't live without. Also, my DVD shelves and yes... even more toys. There's a collection of boxed items like board games and the LEGO set I picked up at Goodwill. an old Lite-Brite, and some tubs of mini-figures like my Indiana Jones Adventure Heroes collection. Also there is a glass jar full of about 10 lbs of marbles from my Grandmother.  

It REALLY bothers me how warped the floor is in this spot. I'm going to have to buy some sort of clamp to hold these two shelves together. Drives. Me. Nuts. I've featured some of these shelves back in October, but some of them have changed since then, and some of the shelves I didn't show because they weren't even remotely Halloween-ish. So you can see some of my advertising characters, Halloween shelves, my Scooby-Doo Mystery Mates, and my Bumble collection. 

Here's a hot of the side of those shelves, and the inside of the door, where I've started pinning up some great classic horror imagery.

 

Finally there's the back end of the room, where I keep, you guessed it, even more books, and from top to bottom: My Might Muggs, Funko Pop figures, Crazy Bone Go-Go figures, the random pop-culture shelf that was also featured in this week's Shelf-Expression League post, and the shelf where I keep all my Fisher Price Little People, Vintage Sesame Street stuff, and my McDonald-Land stuff (there's a space cleared for the lot I recently purchased from Brian over at Cool and Collected... more on THAT later...). 

Down below that are the shelves where I keep my once-life's-passion: My Super Hero Squad collection! All of Marvel's finest super heroes and villains immortalized in happy plastic! Below them are more Halloween items (there are more PEZ in there, but they got knocked over and I only just noticed them as I'm posting this... and I'm too damn lazy to set them up right and re-photograph... but I assure you they will be set to right VERY soon.) My DC Action League collection (sans Green Lanterns, who get a special home on my desk) and a couple of Godzillas on the shelf where I keep my vintage Little Golden Books, Choose Your Own Adventures, and other vintage kid's books. The ugly set of binders at the bottom holds my collection of trading cards, like GPK, Dinosaurs attack, and other various art cards. Plus there are just binders full of crap like old Wizard Magazine articles and other defunct magazines. 

So that's it folks! I know there's a lot of chaos and color, and no real clean, clear display space without books behind it... but I go here to be alone and to soak in the color and calm of my collections. Friends and family look inside and probably see the madness of a hoarder... but I just see a place I can call MINE. I love it so... 

Anyway... I'll be back soon with more Goodwill Goodies, so until then Happy Hunting!