So Brent, have you made any progress on the collection lately?
I'd be interested to see some pictures if you have them. 
Well.......... it sort of depends what you mean by progress? I'm still collecting, yes, but it's really not terribly much fun at this point. The reason being that everything just comes home and goes into a box. Take a look at this shot in the basement:
Now that's not all my stuff, but it's sort of representative because you can't see what goes in behind those boxes in front. I decided to do a pretty substantial reduction of stuff recently and went through all of my boxes and rubbermaid tubs. On the right side, appearing below the shuttle are my 11 long boxes of comics I'd dearly like to unload, but we all know what that market is like. They are sitting on a pallet that's about 5 feet by 5 feet. For the rest of my stuff, boxes and tubs included, there are three other pallets of the same size they are resting on and then you get the vertical component, about six feet in height. So I have about 1350 cubic feet of crap, not including the comics
As mentioned, the stuff in front is just other rubbermaid tubs of stuff. I've reduced my collection a fair bit and will probably do another serious culling of the Hasbro stuff. Of late, like many others it seems, I've just sort of lost interest to a degree. I've put much of it up for sale over at snowtroopers.ca (no offense to anyone here, but I'm trying to reclaim retail pricing on a lot of it and Canadian retail is way higher than you guys would be willing to pay, even after exchange rate is factored in - you're all welcome, but your jaws would probably drop at some prices). Mostly I just decided to get rid of a lot of multiples of figures I had carded for no real reason (loose collector), cull back my armies to about the size of a single squad, unload some duplicate (triplicate) ships and the like. I still like the 3.75" scale a lot, but I don't need a lot of what I have. I'm finding it hard to swallow paying $45 CAD for a new Snowspeeder, primarily for the pack in figure, when for the same price I could pick up a decent, boxed, vintage Snowspeeder and be done with it. Granted it wouldn't be mint, but I could cease worrying about repacks.
I'm contemplating reducing the collection even further, including many of the ships/vehicles I have. I'm just not certain any longer that I need to own 4-5 different X-wings. I do have the OTC versions of Slave I, Falcon, X-wing/Tie (Costco) but skipped Vader's Tie, regretably. I may keep those, but think I may unload many of the other versions, pack in figures be damned. Similarly I have the first two (non clone wars) versions of the gunships up for sale as well at regular Canadian retail as I'm keeping the CW version alone. I'm not opposed to new stuff necessarily, but I don't feel like I want all of it right now. I'll also probably reduce the loose figures a bit and any of the remaining carded figures, save a few. Basically Hasbro just isn't holding my interest lately
The other stuff may be more pricey, but in the end I spend a lot less by not army building, ordering online and not wasting gas and just by buying less stuff overall. I'll probably cull my McFarlane stuff a bit further as well, but there isn't nearly as much work to do there as one would think. Marvel Legends are for the most part fine as I've been largely selective with it anyway.
It's also been quite nice to take in money instead of pushing it out. I've sold off nearly $1000 already and estimate of what's left on the initial list is another $1500 or so. I think I could find another $1000 pretty darn quickly too and that's about half way to a Harley. My best friend and best man at my wedding (Duane, for those who've met him) rides motorcycles and is planning on getting a Harley soon. My wife would also love to have one as she grew up riding motorcycles. So I get to reduce the collection, store up some cash and maybe get a bike out of it
That's of course if I don't go off and start spending money on silly things like a Sacul Kubrick or some boxed/carded vintage stuff
The big motivations for it are two-fold: 1. you see the picture, how much fun is that? Look at the picture below, the Veers Kubrick is out because I'd already boxed up series 6 and didn't want to dig it out, so there he sits with a couple of friends. 2. we won't be finishing the basement all that quickly it seems and reasonably so. Good chunk of change to do it and to be perfectly honest, the house is big enough we don't have any real need aside from a "collection room" for me. We have two spare bedrooms, a family room, a living room and a den where we could let people sleep. The family room is wired for 5.1 and while the tv is only 32", there's not much need for more right now. I still plan on going with 6.1 and a projector in the basement when we get around to it, but there isn't much rush. My kid is way happier outdoors and I'm not going to argue that at all.
On top of that, I'm not really strongly motivated by Hasbro's SDCC announcements. There's some really cool stuff there, no doubt about it, but so many rehashes/repaints or single figures in pack sets that it's not worth the money to me. I'm more impressed by Gentle Giant these days with both busts and bust ups. Frankly the bust ups are nicer to me than the Hasbro 3.75" figures these days as is. I'm just sort of moving towards higher end stuff I guess. So it all ends with a decreased interest in Hasbro. I really enjoy looking at Scott/OCB's stuff, it's simple and not overdone. As impressive as Rob's collection is, I can't do that so I'm leaning away from hasbro basically.
As for what's currently on display, this covers it
Pretty sad, eh? And a crappy picture to boot
That's sitting on top of the bookcase that holds half of our DVDs. I'm thinking of putting more stuff up there, primarily putting out the Kubricks and the vintage collection, if only to get them out of storage. But the rest of it is doomed to the basement for some time. Prior to building the room downstairs I don't have much interest in putting stuff out, only to pack it up during construction again.
Suffice to say it's not overly motivating for collecting these days.
As for the house itself, it's doing alright. We've had to wait for several things for what seems like a long time, but given what I know about some others (hey Drew) we've had a pretty short wait really. The biggest pain has been moving from a house with a pool to a house that's sitting on mud during the hottest summer in quite some time. Painful. We'll hopefully get the pool dug this year and we still have to fence, build a deck and landscape the entire yard. There are also issues within the house and related to the construction of the house that we need to deal with yet, but my wife is doing an amazing job of keeping the builder in line
If you guys want pics of the house furnished, let me know.
