Unconventional Cardboard Storage

Living in a part of the country that's ripe with antiques and country stores, I'm always on the lookout for card storage mechanisms that look a little more attractive than the white cardboard boxes much of my collection is stored in.  Recently, I stumbled into a couple of cool items on this front, so I thought they might make for an interesting post and a nice break from the stream of "look what cards I got" posts.

First up, this Wilson's Certified processed cheese box.  Yes, it's exactly what it sounds like; back in the day these little wooden boxes were used to ship about 5 lbs each of processed cheese!  Quite a few of these survived to the modern age, and they're not all that rare to find to be honest.  I just love the worn look and history of the thing, certainly more aesthetically pleasing in my home office/card room than some of the alternatives like I said.

Here's a look at one of the front panels, great shot of the Wilson & Co logo.  American-made, in Wisconsin baby!  Those of you with a keen eye have probably already picked up on why I brought this box home with me.  I had a sneaking suspicion, which proved to be correct...

...that the box is the absolute perfect size to hold PSA slabs!  This little box will secure between 40 and 50 PSA-graded cards by my estimation.  Of course, it'll do just fine for penny sleeved or top-loaded cards as well, and would hold even more of those.  Best of all, it set me back only $10 or so, no more than one of the assemble-yourself BCW cardboard boxes would have cost me most likely.

Believe it or not, I found another storage mechanism in recent weeks though that is even cooler than that.  Check out this ornate beauty!

This box absolutely intrigued me the moment that I saw it.  I've never really seen another box like it.  It's got some serious weight to it, and is felt-lined along the bottom, as well as throughout the interior.  The craftsmanship is actually pretty stunning, really nice solid wood with some cool little touches like the striping down the sides and the design on top to really give it a luxurious feel.

Here's a look at it from the side.  There are a pair of hinges on the back, and the top actually folds back on those to reveal the inside, as opposed to coming all the way off.  Any guesses as to what this was?  Give up?  Well, it turns out it was some type of display piece for a high-end retail store that was used to display a cutlery set that was for sale!

Obviously, since it's being featured here, you know what I thought of right away.  There are three divided sections inside, all felt-lined as I mentioned, and if I removed a couple of modular inserts that were in place above each to hold the cutlery, they looked like they may be the perfect little cubbies to store some cards in!

Here it is opened up with some of my graded baseball cards stored inside...

As you can see, each of the three sections neatly holds two rows of graded cards, with enough room down the middle to make flipping through and pulling cards out a breeze.  The bonus shelf in the back works perfectly for horizontally-oriented cards like my Nolan Ryan RC there.

For now, I'm storing all of the cards from my Cardboard Keepers experiment in this case, but at some point there will be too many of them to contain in here.  At that stage I might re-dedicate this as my spot for a valued graded player collection, like Nolan Ryan or Wayne Gretzky.  Whatever it stores though, it looks absolutely awesome in my office and is a great way to display my collection with pride.

With these now in use, my working desk is so much more pleasant a place to sit and sort, and blog about cards.  What used to look like this...

...now looks like this...

Ah, much better!

Put these together with my card chest that I use for COMC yet-to-be-posted cards, and things are looking nice in my home office here.  Of course, I still have way more cards than I do cool and unique places to store them like this.  Hopefully, as I keep my eye out for more interesting storage mechanisms while simultaneously reducing the size of my collection, I can increase the percentage of my cards that are stored in something cool like these boxes.

How about you, have you ever used or do you currently use any non-standard storage mechanisms for your collection?  If so, I'd love to hear about them in the comments.  Thanks as always for stopping by!