Mopping Up Operations

Its been a slow, painful process but at last there has been noticeable (just barely) progress on cleaning up. The issue of what exactly to do with miscellaneous surplus-to-requirements not-very-sale-able or even give-away-able soldiers, books and rules is a puzzler which is still tying up valuable space but I can work around that till various schemes come to fruition over the next year. (At which point drastic and terminal action may have to be taken).

 In the meantime, I have gotten rid of some things such as my old styrafoam hills and about 1/2 of my magazine clippings and old papers and a small amount of broken stuff that I have been planning to fix for a  few years now.  This means I need to speed up work on those flat wooden hills or rely more on my cloth over hills approach.  The magazine clipping clear out is a mistake which I intentionally repeat every few years. I did manage to hang onto a few sentimental bits, my first ever wargame magazine (an issue of Gene McCoy's Wargamers Digest), souvenirs of hosting Phil Barker for a few days in 1980, my first magazine (WI) article about rules from July of 1989 (is that really 23 years ago??)    But some sentimental stuff went as did numerous reference files for projects that will not now be undertaken, either because I have already dipped a toe and decided it wasn't right (like the " Savage & Romantic"  , or because it would require too big a commitment of time, money and space.  (Anyone want 3 volumes of Oman or the Blandford Peninsula War uniforms book? oh and I guess my book on the British Legion in the Carlist wars. Postage is ridiculously high)

However, it hasn't been all destruction. I have also slightly expanded available shelving by rearranging things and getting innovative and I am working on more. There are some hard choices here too, wall space tentatively marked for prints to be framed and hung are likely to end up covered in shelves unless something changes but here too an alternative is being experimented with, non-conventional mounting on thin boards screwed to the sloping ceiling instead of framing and hanging. Not as good but vertical, non-window & door spaces in this old house are at an extreme premium and some of these prints have been waiting nearly 30 years for me to have a place to display them.  

I have also been working on having multiple dice, tape and game-marker stations, handy to both sides of the table and not located under a table cloth like the current one. With these will come several, easy to reach, Casualty Clearing Stations where casualties can be placed when playing single figure games. These should help ease the post game clean up issues surrounding single figures.

Tackling the waist high crawl in, under the eaves, cupboard is next. If there are no further blog posts, you'll be able to guess what my fate has been.