Two steps forward and two steps back. That’s the saying, right? It means that even though I’m making progress, I’m not really getting anywhere.

So let’s start with the good news. I found a TV stand for my Trinitron! I had been cruising around Craigslist and whatnot for a while, but nothing was panning out. Then, on my lunch break one day, I decided to hit up my local Goodwill and what did I find? This little diddy.

You see that price tag? Let’s zoom in a little.

4 freaking dollars! How awesome is that? Is it the prettiest piece of furniture around? Of course not. But it’s hard to argue with that price. I’m loving the setup, too. It’s got this slide out tray that’s perfect for putting a temp system on, like say I just wanted to hook up something weird for the afternoon, now it doesn’t’ have to go on the floor. Genius! It’s also got a little door to hide stuff like wires, and most importantly, it’s on wheels! This makes getting to the back easy as pie. Granted, once it’s all set up the way I want, the back won’t necessarily need to be accessed all that often, but in the interim, it’s a real lifesaver. Wheels are always a good thing.

Of course, getting my TV up on this thing was quite the task, and it certainly could have gone better. My plan was to call a friend to help me lift it , but when I brought the TV stand home, my mom offered to help me lift the TV. Look, my mom is far from fragile. I mean, she watches my kids all day, and those little monsters are insane. But this TV is HEAVY. I asked her if she was sure, and she said she was up to the challenge. I asked her again, warning that this thing was absurdly heavy, and she said she wanted to give it a try. Well, it went about as well as I could have reasonably expected. Our first attempt ended with us dropping the TV a short distance while my mom fell over. But she would not be denied! After a minute she said “Alright, let’s try again.” I didn’t think it was a good plan, but she wouldn’t be talked out of it. We got it mostly on top of the shelf, but those darn wheels! The shelf started rolling, we couldn’t keep the balance, and the TV fell again. This time it hit one of the corners and dented the side of the TV pretty bad. The floor somehow managed to be okay in all of this. Not sure what it’s made of, but I’m glad it seems to be impervious to harm. After we caught our breath, my mom said she wanted to give it one last shot. So, we got our bearings, set the shelf so it wouldn’t move, made our peace with our loved ones in case we died, and gave it one last go. Victory was ours. So was sweat. Lots of sweat.

Having that TV on a piece of furniture was a huge step in making the basement feel like it was coming together. It just looked so much more clean. With that set, I started shopping around for the most important piece of this puzzle; shelves to set stuff up on. The “best” option I found was this.

This is the Oskar, and it seems like the perfect thing for what I’m looking to do. I had one of these a long time ago for my DVDs and it held up remarkably well. My main complaint is that the shelf in the middle is fixed. That sucker isn’t adjustable at all, which could potentially throw me off, but I think it might be worth it. I haven’t found any other affordable options out there that fit the space as well as this does. The next closest thing I found that I’ve liked at all is the BILLY from Ikea, but that’s more of a bookshelf, meaning the shelves are deeper, approximately 9 inches. That’s probably going to stick out from the wall too much. Where the shelves are going, there’s going to be a perceived bottleneck near the stairs, so keeping the shelves shallow is important to make that less of a problem. With the setup I have now, I can perfectly fit 2 of these Oskar guys next to one another. That should potentially handle the bulk of my boxed stuff, or at least the stuff I’m hoping to have on display. That said, I still don’t really have a good grip on how much space all my stuff is going to take up on these shelves, and I’m anticipating some difficult decisions in the not too distant future.

As for the loose carts, I’m thinking shelving kind of like this.

I’ll get bookends to keep the games from falling off the sides, and I’ll hang these over the couch. I was concerned before about using shelving like this, but I think once the carts are there it will look nice. Plus, it’s the most affordable option when it comes to adjustable hanging shelves.

So there’s the two steps forward. I’ve come to an almost-conclusion on what I want to put my games on, and I have a TV stand. But like I said, it’s not all forward momentum.

Over the summer, a few things happened. First, my kids and their cousin spent a ton of time in the basement playing. They’d go outside and futz around, then cool off in the basement. It’s pretty much the perfect setup for them. My niece got really good at Splatoon. Second, my son’s birthday party just happened to fall on a very rainy day, and we were forced to change our plans from hosting it in the backyard to moving the party to the basement. After seeing the long-term effects of what children actually do in that basement over the summer, I knew I had to make some changes before that birthday party. First, all the boxes I had set down there to be organized had to be moved back upstairs and stored in my garage. There was too much stuff that the kids kept getting into when I wasn’t around. My niece once decided to “unpack” a few boxes for me while my mom was upstairs making her lunch, and there were several figures and games set up in places where my 1 year old daughter could easily grab them and break them. My niece thought she was being helpful, but in fact, she was being quite the opposite. So I cleared some more room in my garage and lugged all those boxes back upstairs. This was most problematic because there isn’t really much room to work in the garage, and if I’m ever going get this stuff set up the way I want, having it all accessible to sort through in small intervals is key. Unfortunately, that’s just not an option at the moment.

The kids love playing down here.

I should probably back up a bit and explain the “sorting through” bit. I don’t think I talked about this here before. See, all my life I’ve been collecting this stuff, always assuming I’d have a game room of some sort someday, but never really knowing what size said game room would be. Well, now I know exactly how much room I have to work with, and I officially have WAY too much stuff. So, what I need to do is separate my stuff into 3 piles; keep, sell, and store. The sell pile is going to be big, and I don’t necessarily expect to make much money off my old promotional tshirts and whatever the heck else I’ve got lying around in boxes, but right now, that stuff is taking up valuable space, and I’d rather see it go to someone who would love and appreciate it than have it sit in my attic rotting in some box. Of course, some of this stuff will absolutely sit in my attic rotting in some box because I simply can’t bare to get rid of it and it’s just not all going to fit down in the basement, but I’m telling myself that’s going to be a relatively contained situation. I can’t hoard everything. Some things I just have to be willing to let go of.

The second set back is a bit of a bigger bummer, and that is delaying buying shelves, for the time being at least. In the interest of simply not having anywhere else better to put it when we moved in, one of our old DVD racks made its way into the basement, and I decided to use it. I put a handful of DVDs and games on it so a few of the things I wanted to have accessible could have a place to live that wasn’t in a box in the closet. However, what this shelf taught me was that my daughter must grab things on shelves. Each and every time she was put on the floor in the basement, one of two things would happen. Either she would head straight to the stairs and try to climb them, or she would head straight for the DVD rack and start yanking things off it. Granted, I was proud that she kept going tor the Fraggle Rock DVDs, but if it was on a shelf, it needed to be either in her mouth or on the floor. And this isn’t the kind of thing we could just try and distract her away from. This little bugger is relentless. She would not stop until either she had things in her hands, or she was in tears. I decided that before the birthday party, that shelf needed to go away. Ellie simply could not be trusted to be in he same room as things on shelves, especially if they were things I cared about the condition of.

So that led me to the undeniable fact that if I were to get shelves and put games on them now, they would undoubtedly be destroyed in no time. My earlier idea of shelves that start 3 feet off the ground wasn’t going to work because it wouldn’t leave nearly enough room to house my collection, so barring some sort of gate or door system, which would likely be more expensive than I can afford, regular shelves are going to be my only option for game displaying, and with that being the case, I need to wait until my daughter is old enough to understand what “don’t touch that” means. That’ a pretty big bummer. I want this game room to start coming together, but this stuff just takes time.

There’s one more obstacle in my way, and that’s the living room. We currently have our old furniture sitting up there, but we want to get a new couch and stuff to set up the living room properly, and once that’s done, one of those couches is going into the basement top be set up in front of the CRT for game playing goodness. That particular piece of the puzzle is going to be clutch in shaping my game area, but it can’t be done until we spend time shopping for and buying new living room furniture, and as you can probably imagine, living room furniture isn’t exactly cheap.

So there you have it. It’s coming together, and yet, it’s not. But I’ve waited 36 years to make this room a reality, I can wait a little more. In the mean time, I’ll just have to keep trying to get things organized.