Spring Cleaning For Card Collectors
By Matt Gilman of Cards Over Coffee
It’s almost that time of year. The time when you start to tear apart your house and take part in the yearly tradition known as spring cleaning.
I not only participate in that when it comes to my house, but I also do this for my card collection too. I think all collectors need to do some touching up to their collections after a long winter. When it comes to spring cleaning my collection, I have two projects that I do.
The first part of my project is cleaning out overly used toploaders from cards I acquired over the winter. The ones that are covered with stickers, tape, have “yellowing” and card savers in general. I like to have a neat and tidy looking collection, one I can brag about.
So I always make sure to have extra new toploaders on hand before I begin this part of my spring cleaning project.
And here are my first four cards from this past winter. The first image is before, and the second is after I replaced the toploaders. Such an improvement. Clean, clear, and looks like a million bucks. This is usually the longer project between the two I do, so I always start this one first.
The second part of my spring cleaning project is taking care of what I call, “the boxes”.
“The boxes” are shoe boxes, diaper boxes, and any other box I could find around the house to throw my duplicates into. I only collect one of every card unless it’s for a specific project. That means all of my doubles get tossed into these boxes until the spring comes where I sort them out as part of my spring cleaning.
Sometimes I can collect quite a few of these boxes and other times it will just be one. It all depends on how much acquire over the winter.
There are multiple things I do with all of these doubles so it takes a lot of sorting. I usually put it all into three piles. One pile goes to donation, the next pile I sell at a yard sale or sometimes just hand out to kids who show up to my yard sale to help expand the hobby.
The final pile is sorted out in a box by sport, team or player depending on who it is. This box is known for my trade bait. Normally I use card dividers since they hold up better in the box overtime, but I had just run out before starting this. I will replace the index cards when my next order comes in with the card dividers.
Depending on how many cards there are in this pile, will also depend on how many boxes I need to do this with. Usually throughout the year I will weed out all of the trade bait and start over again the following spring.
This may seem like a lot of work, but Spring cleaning isn’t something that’s always easy, but the reward afterward is so worth it. I feel that way for my collection and for my house. I hope you will jump on spring cleaning your collection too, it’s worth it.