May 20, 2006
Story and Photos by Chris Rhoads (dustrho)

Since I only had a fraction of my childhood collection in my possession, I thought about buying vintage toys that I had grown up playing with. This wasn’t going to be such an easy task for me, especially since vintage toys are typically worth more money than what’s currently sold in stores, but this wasn’t going to stop me. I relied heavily on eBay for for adding vintage items back into my collection, and with a lot of patient shopping I picked up several good deals for incredibly low prices. The best deal, in my eyes, was the eight vintage Biker Scouts (five with original pistols) that I picked up for $55 on eBay. Some may think that I paid a little too much for them, but I thought it was well worth the money as these look like they were just removed from their vintage cardbacks. They were sparkling white, had no scuff marks, and were just perfect in each and every way possible. What’s even better is that in that lot of figures I scored a short mouthed Biker Scout, which is much rarer than the regular Biker Scout figures, and it’s the only one of its kind in my collection.

THE OLD ROOM
Before I knew it, I had an entire spare bedroom completely jam-packed with Star Wars toys. I couldn’t believe how quickly it amassed in front of me. Every wall in that room (at my old townhouse) had something relating to Star Wars on it. Near the end of my stay and due to the lack of room, there were a lot of my things that had to be kept in Rubbermaid storage containers. Not being able to display your entire Star Wars collection can be depressing to a Star Wars collector. This is when I knew that I would need to get either a bigger room for my collection, or think of a better way to display all of it in one viewing area. That’s when house-hunting came into play for me.

My wife and I looked for several months back in 2004 to find the perfect house for us, and one of the most important things that we needed was to have a large basement to display my entire Star Wars collection. It didn’t have to be a finished basement, but that sure would have been nice if it came that way. After walking through well more than ten houses, the house of dreams had been discovered, and that meant it was time to start packing up my collection for the big move. That wasn’t going to be easy, as I really had no idea how to even think about packing away. It was going to take some time and thought to figure out the best strategy to moving it, but since we had a month or so I at least didn’t feel rushed to get it done.

MY BUNKER
Packing up my collection went easier then planned, and once it was all moved into the basement of our new house it was all going to remain in their storage containers. I really wanted to take everything out, but there were several things that made me not do it. One thing I thought of was that I should wait until we could finish the basement, since it was an unfinished basement. However, because that was going to involve a lot of money that idea was quickly put to rest. Instead, I was going to go out and buy some shelving units to start displaying my collection. It might have been approximately two months before I opened any of the storage containers to put items on the shelves, but it would end up being well worth the wait since this was going to be my bunker!

When we bought this new house, my wife had promised me that this would be all mine for my Star Wars collection. Granted that some of the space would need to be allocated for other items (i.e. holiday decorations, storage containers, etc), but I would have to say that about ninety percent of the entire basement is all mine. My wife kept true to her word, and allowed me to head on out to some local stores to find the best deal on shelving units. I ended up initially buying seven white standard bookshelves that have a total of five shelves in each unit, and of course I thought it would have been plenty of shelving space for my collection. Boy, was I wrong! I now have a total of twelve shelving units, but even that’s not enough to display everything that I own. I was able to buy the shelves at a store called Meijer for just under $30 each, which I thought was a pretty good deal, especially since I thought they were going to be about $50 each. The crappy part about these shelves (and like many others) is that there is “some assembly required.” I thought to myself, “How hard could that possibly be?” It’s easy for me to sit back and laugh now about it, but at the time I was really pissed off. These came with very weak instructions, but were good enough to get the damn things put together. However, because I was trying to screw these things together with a regular screw driver I ended up getting really bad blisters on my hands. They were so bad that there was no way they were going to be completed any time soon. That’s when my wife stepped up to the plate and finished them for me using a power screwdriver. So, in just a couple hours I had seven shelves waiting to be filled with my bounty.

Now came the hard part. I asked myself, "How in the world do I want to display all of this?" It wasn’t going to be easy since I had so many different things to put on my shelves. I had all sorts of different things like toys, marketing/promotional items, books, magazines, videos, video games, etc, and it was going to take a little bit of time to come up with a game plan for the layout of my bunker. Because I couldn’t wait any longer, I started opening all the storage containers, and began emptying them out onto the shelves. I tried to use some logic in all of this, so that one shelf had all of my Saga figures, another shelf had all of my Star Wars LEGO sets, and so forth. But, as I mentioned earlier, I ran out of shelf space real quick, and it required me to go out and buy five more shelving units. So, after those were all built (this time I used a power screwdriver  to put them together), I now had a grand total of twelve shelves all standing side-by-side on one wall. I stood there in the center of the room, stared at what was standing in front of me, and thought to myself how cool it looked with all of them on one single wall.

Since there were other walls I had to figure out how to utilize them to their fullest. One wall was a half wall, meaning that just behind it was a crawlspace, so I wasn’t really sure how I was going to use the space on that wall. Luckily, my wife came up with a great idea, and that was to install pegboard which would hold a large number of my carded figures. So, that was installed (with her assistance), and I moved my entire Saga collection on all the pegs I could fit on there. I’ve received many comments from people who have seen my collection and they say that it looks like a toy store with all the figures hanging from the pegs. That was kind of the look I was hoping to achieve.

Just when I thought I was all good I still needed more shelves to display my collection. This time instead of buying additional white shelving units I went with these wood/metal shelves that you can arrange in a couple different ways. One way is to have one really tall unit, and the other way is where you could split it in half to have two smaller shelves. I went with the latter because I was going to use these to setup battle scenes using loose figures and vehicles (i.e. dioramas). These shelves filled out rather quickly, but I knew that was bound to happen. Instead of

CLIMATE CONTROL
One thing that was concerning to me was the amount of humidity in the basement, and I was fearful that it was going to have a damaging effect on all of my carded figures. Since the humidity was very high down there (it was summer time) I knew right then and there that I would need to get myself a de-humidifier to lower the humidity levels. More than $200 later I came home with a very nice de-humidifier that to two years later is still working nicely. It has a nice digital readout that tells you what the room temperature is and the humidity level, which were definitely nice features to have on this thing. After I plugged it in for the first time the humidity level was at almost 100%. I couldn’t believe it was that humid down there, but after letting it run for a day the level dropped to reasonable levels (50% or less) to where I felt pretty comfortable with having my collection down there.

Another thing that I thought about doing was to close all the vents in the basement, because I really didn’t have to worry too much about the temperature down there. The basement stayed nice and cool during the summer (without having any A/C flowing in the basement) and stayed just warm enough in the winter to be comfortable enough to work on little projects and tasks. I did bring down a small space heater, and fortunately I only had to use it on a couple of occasions when it got really cold outside.

MY WORKBENCH
Last March my grandfather passed away, and while we were cleaning up his old condo I had asked my mom if I could have his old desk. She told me that I could have it as long as I moved it on my own. It wasn’t too hard to move on my own, as it wasn’t your typical solid wood desk. It was one large wood table top that rested on top of two metal filing cabinets. My grandfather had drilled a couple of large doorknob sized holes in it, so that he could easily run electrical cords through them so they wouldn’t be dangling all over the top of it. It seemed to be a good solution, one that I would use after I had it setup in my basement.

After I got it all setup in the basement, I wanted to add a little bit of Star Wars flare to it, so with a couple of small shelves I added some Star Wars collectibles to the desk. I placed my grandfather’s old desk lamp (which must be more than forty years old!), filled the drawers with small tools and other necessities, and it was beginning to fit in nicely down in the bunker. My main intentions with this desk was to use it for customizing figures, something I had never done in my entire life, but was very eager to start doing some of my own customizing. The desk would end up being the perfect workbench, as it was big enough and spacious enough for all of my tools (paint brushes, acrylic paints, blades, custom fodder, etc). After heavily using the desk it is still in mint shape, as if I had just brought it home the previous day. What’s most important about this desk is knowing that my grandfather sat it every single day for the majority of his later years in his life, so every time I sit down in front of it I think about him and remember how great of a person he once was. Boy, do I miss him.

PROBLEMS
Since the basement has been my bunker, I have only had a couple problems with it. The first one involved my sump pump going out, which required me to go out to Home Depot and purchase a new one. Sad part of that is that I spent almost $200 on a new one. My dad helped me with that and said I should get the best one that’s made, seeing as how it was going to be protecting my large investment of Star Wars collectibles. It only took about an hour total to replace the old sump pump with the new one, and best of all is that it was taken care of before there were any water problems down there. I have to say that I was quite lucky that I wasn’t out of town when the damn thing took a crap on me, because I could have come home to a very wet basement. That would not have been good!

Other small things have been problematic down there, but nothing as big as the sump pump fiasco. Just recently I walked downstairs to add some of the newly acquired VTSC figures to one of my shelves, and I happened to notice a puddle of water by one of my shelving units. What scared me a great deal was the fact that it was the one shelf that happens to have all of my more valuable carded figures (two vintage figures and other miscellaneous figures). I totally freaked out, but as I approached the shelf I noticed that the water that had collected on each shelf didn’t completely saturate each shelf. So, even though there was plenty of water on each shelf, the water hadn’t gone back far enough to even touch the carded figures. Talk about being lucky! I had to take everything off of that shelf, dry each shelf, and then everything was put back into place. Although the toys weren’t put back on their shelves until we figured out what was causing the water leak.

We discovered that the water was coming directly below our sliding patio doors, and thought that perhaps there was a leak somewhere in that area. We looked all over the place, and after a suggestion from my father my wife cleaned out the track that holds the patio doors in place. It was all clogged up with years of dirt, so much that it had clogged up these drainage holes. Now how the water got down into the basement was another story, but since the track was cleaned we haven’t had any further water problems in the basement.

IN CONCLUSION
It’s been almost two years since we moved into that house, and my basement keeps getting more Star Wars product down there. You think I would have run out of room by now, but there’s still plenty of space for future Star Wars collectibles. Now, I know I will be in for a major headache when the time comes to finishing the basement, but thankfully I won’t have to worry about that for quite some time.