Oh for a bag of holding

December 17, 2015 11:05 AM

My husband has about eleventy-billion Magic cards in various binders and boxes. He plays at our dining room table, and the area on and around it are cluttered with them. He wants access to all cards at all times, and our old house doesn't have any downstairs closets (because it was build before MTG was invented, I assume). I would really, really like to declutter the room, as it's both the first room guests see in the house and a place I would like to eat dinner again.

The pile has been growing for three years, and I don't want to live like this anymore. Can anyone recommend any storage furniture/systems that is both affordable and won't chip or otherwise fall apart in a year or so. Maybe one that would fit in a corner and has easy access to the contents (because otherwise they'll end up just piled on top). Bonus points if it doesn't look out of place in a 19th century house.

posted by bibliowench to Home & Garden (15 answers total)

IKEA discontinued their Expedit bookshelf, but the Kallax replacement is good. Comes in a bunch of sizes, and is quite sturdy. Record collectors love 'em, and they're the perfect size for binders.
posted by SansPoint at 11:10 AM on December 17, 2015 [8 favorites]

Maybe a local antiques store can help you get your hands on an old-school library card catalog cabinet.
posted by dywypi at 11:12 AM on December 17, 2015 [20 favorites]

Cardboard-box wise, when I used to have tens of thousands of VTES cards, I used a few of these and they worked great:
http://www.bcwsupplies.com/type/cardboard-boxes/card-house-storage-box
posted by jozxyqk at 11:17 AM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Do you have access to an Ikea? They have so many solutions for this sort of thing. I don't know why people bag on it as disposable furniture - the Ikea stuff I have, I have had for years, it looks nice and does just fine. I wouldn't buy Kallax, though, as it is one of the few that you can't get with doors, and I'm thinking you want to be able to just shut the doors on your husband's mess, yes? You can get a Billy bookcase system in just about any dimension, and they look very nice with doors on them. If that's too shallow, Besta is quite deep, and you can put doors on it too.
posted by fingersandtoes at 11:19 AM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

'Harvard style' library catalog cards were (are?) 2" x 5". MtG cards are 2.5" x 3.5", so it's *possible* they won't fit. But that sounds like an excellent way to store them, especially a nice old catalog in your 19th century house. Check Craigslist?
posted by hanov3r at 11:22 AM on December 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Nthing the card catalogue idea. I have a friend who did this and it looks great!
posted by microcarpetus at 11:28 AM on December 17, 2015

Probably no solution will work without his buy-in and ongoing support. My thought is together find a binder designed to look like an antique book, and then buy an old majestic library's worth of them, then matching wooden shelves of these ornate "books" can become an attractive feature of the room to you and guests, and provide fitting Great-Library-of-Magic gravitas for him and the other gamers.

He would need a system to identify the books from their spine (else they'll never get kept on shelves). Gold lettering can be added to most things with letraset, and there are plenty of other options. Finding a few different "types" of faux-book binder could also help categorize things, kind of like a law-library approach.

(Perhaps combine with the card catalogues mentioned above for extra library stylings?)
posted by anonymisc at 11:31 AM on December 17, 2015 [10 favorites]

19th Century house? I'd get an era-appropriate sideboard where he can store his binders and boxes. The interior of sideboards can always be reshelved to provide optimal configuration. Glass door panes can be replaced with smoked glass panes for very little money.

If you need to store things that would normally go in this sideboard, like plates and dishes, you can mount two rows of shelves above and display them decoratively -- kind of like this, but with more rows.
posted by DarlingBri at 11:46 AM on December 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

You can totally get doors and drawers for the Kallax, as well as a variety of attractive baskets that fit in the shelves. We have one for an entryway console/room divider/storage, and it is quite handy.
posted by matildaben at 11:50 AM on December 17, 2015

IKEA furniture is often clean-lined and modern, and may not suit your existing décor or furniture with a 19th century house.

Seconding DarlingBri's suggestion of a sideboard. That type of furniture has many names - with a glassed-in set of shelves added, it's a china cabinet. Other names for similar pieces of furniture are hutch, buffet, breakfront, credenza, or console.

These pieces are not much in fashion lately, but in the past were frequently sold as part of a "dining-room set." You can probably find one fairly inexpensively at your local Salvation Army, Habitat Re-Store, or through Craigslist. I just recently gave away a gigantic china cabinet (7' tall x 6' wide) because I couldn't sell it and didn't want to move it.
posted by Ardea alba at 12:56 PM on December 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Binders are great, 5-row boxes are great, but it really depends how many he has. I'd honestly recommend he cull them and get rid of the excess. When I was a hardcore Magic player/collector/dealer, I blew out a ton of excess stuff so I didn't have to store it. It's not that hard to get rid of cards, and he's probably got plenty that he can get rid of. Plus that way he can use the money to buy more!
posted by Slinga at 4:20 PM on December 17, 2015

The china cabinets are incredibly inexpensive because no one uses them any more. Most of them come apart, too, and the top part with glassed-in shelves make GREAT bars, standing alone by themselves. If you want to use it as two pieces of furniture, look for ones that light up and that have a full "leg" where the top stands on the bottom part and a solid top. We did this when putting together my daughter's first apartment after college, and got a media stand (bottom) and lighted bar (top) for $80 on Craigslist. I have no idea where I first saw the idea, but here's a random blog post showing the idea. In her apartment the two pieces are a simple modern style with straight lines and no adornments, sit facing each other across a room and it looks really, really good. All we did was put on new handles.
posted by raisingsand at 4:31 PM on December 17, 2015

I wouldn't buy Kallax, though, as it is one of the few that you can't get with doors

There are door inserts for Kallax (and drawers and pull-out boxes).
posted by EndsOfInvention at 2:01 AM on December 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'll be jiggered. EndsofInvention is right, you can even get doors on the Kallax unit. What will they think of next? OP, you have lots of options here. Another possibility would be a hybrid of modern and old: you could get an old fashioned china hutch thing off Craigslist which would be more harmonious with your decor, but fill it with magazine holders which he can put his stuff into so it doesn't just land in gruesome piles that you'd need to look at behind the glass of the hutch. These might be more realistic than asking him to organize it in binders... I'm guessing if he were a binder kind of guy you wouldn't be in this pickle in the first place.
posted by fingersandtoes at 8:31 AM on December 18, 2015

wait, my mistake, he likes the binders! (Sorry my gamer is a D&D guy so I don't know the binder scene so much.) But for the cards, maybe something like this could keep them neat in a hutch?
posted by fingersandtoes at 8:41 AM on December 18, 2015