Office Space

No, this isn’t another review of a Greg Daniels TV series (although another one is in the pipeline).

In June I gave myself a C grade on my midyear report for the progress I’d made on the display shelves in my office. Since then, my wife Tina and I took a week off work to focus on painting and organizing the basement, and setting up my office.

Here’s an update on how setting up my collection is coming.

My Office

This is the general layout (*salutes*) of my office.

1. My closet. Nothing to see here, just office supplies, comics, and boxes Tetrised into a space. It’s pretty boring.
2. Accessible office supplies shelf. Also boring.
3. My desk. Why did I start with the boring stuff? But what am I supposed to do, change the graphic? No, I’m committed and there’s nothing I can do but carry on.
4. My computer. This list is boring because of you!
5. Dio shelves. I have two wall mounted glass cabinets with
6. Toy Galaxy commemorative shelving
7. Terrordrome diorama
8. Curio display shelves

My progress so far:

Finally coming along.

Dio Shelves

Out of frame, the dio shelves will be the last section I setup. For a reason. These shelves are 30cm across, 15 cm deep, with a lot of flexibility for height. Medium sized GI Joe vehicles fit nicely on the shelf, or a couple of small vehicles. I can fit close to a dozen figures in a scene, or way more if they’re standing rank and file.

The flexibility these shelves offer mean that once everything that needs a certain amount of space has it, I get to play around with the best way to display what’s left.

My Toy Galaxy Homage

If you are at all a fan of toys and cartoons based on 80s properties, do yourself a favour and subscribe to Dan Larson’s YouTube channel, Toy Galaxy.

In addition to being informative and entertaining, seeing Dan Larson’s collection on display gives me shelf envy.

It may not have art elements or cool lighting, but I think my shelves look more like Dan’s than I expected.

The centerpiece is a collection of Canadian GI Joe Convention boxed sets, San Diego Comic Con exclusives, and a diorama (complete with snow flock) featuring the original Canadian GI Joe Convention exclusive figures.

On the left hand side is a column of Sigma 6 Joes. The right hand column features thematic shelves: comics, Star Wars, monsters, and Shadowrun, with Transformers spread across the top. That leaves five shelves in varying stages of knowing what to do with them.

Terrordrome Diorama

I don’t care if the USS Flagg is considered the holy grail of GI Joe playsets, the Terrordrom beats it aesthetically, functionality, and iconic imagery. If I could afford a USS Flagg, I’d soon spend that money on extra Terrordromes.

Speaking of money, this will definitely end up the most expensive section of my office. The complete Terrordrome, Cobra Missile Command Headquarters reproduction, and all of those boxes of Raging Spoon Complex action figure diorama piece alone compare to the cost of my centerpiece shelf, and I haven’t put the over a hundred Cobra army builders on the shelf yet.

I am crafting some simple styrofoam backdrops at the moment, which is what’s halting progress on this section. What’s there now is basically placeholders and for measuring.

Curio Display Shelves

A property as old as GI Joe, and as successful as it was at its heights, spawns interesting tie-in merchandise.

Between licensees trying to jump on the band wagon in the 80s and those who grew up on GI Joe hoping to tap into nostalgia for it (Hasbro included), the GI Joe logo and characters ended up in some strange and interesting places. This shelf will house the GI Joe oddities I’ve picked up over the years, as well as a Joe Headquarters on the bottom shelf.

Art (Location TBD)

One area I am worried I need a solution for is my artwork. It serves as the finishing touch once my selves are done. Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of wall space, and I have dozens of prints of varying size that I’d love to display. Hopefully I think up a solution to the art to space ratio, because it would be a shame to put any of these pieces into storage.

The Next Step

I’m not sure I can upgrade my score to a B yet. There’s still a lot to be done. Fortunately, this blog post showed me that the bottleneck to my displays is the backdrops of my Terrordrome dioramas. I will make time this week to get those done so that I can get my boxes of loose figures off the curio shelves and start displaying them properly.