Cardboard Census: Part One

It's a dreary, rainy day here at the Central Hivemind, and I've only got a couple small trade packages to put away.  I am waiting on another spontaneous SportLots order, but otherwise there aren't many card related chores to do. 

So I decided to finally dive into counting my cards.

I've configured a spreadsheet to break it down into the different storage locations, and then by the shelves, etc. contained within each.  This way I can keep track a piece at a time.  Some areas will go quickly, while others will be much more tedious and require a lot of hand counting.  The majority of my bulk is complete sets, which go fast, but I've already run into some things that complicate counting beyond just recording the last base card number.

I counted one shelf of my wire rack so far.  It's the bottom one that contains nine 3-row boxes (the 3000 count type).  Within those sets, I've encountered short prints (Heritage, GQ), variations, and alphabetically numbered inserts.  These are all things you have to take into account.  With some of them, it's easier to take the number of the full set and subtract the missing ones that are listed on my want lists.  For others, it's just old fashioned hand sifting - and remembering numbers.

When I'm done, there are going to be some other tasks that I'll want to do.  Like going back through my 1991 Topps set and seeing if I really have all but six of the variations that I think I have.  I skipped some of the asterisk differences, but I see on the database that there are others that I don't remember getting.  I'm sure that task list will grow.

The part I'm really dreading is the Redskins (in the blue vinyl cases) which will be almost all hand counting, and my player collection binders, which won't be quite so tedious, but will be interesting as I count full pages and then subract the empty slots from that total.

I'm wondering if I'll run into a lot of questionable calls in those binders especially.  Do I consider the album stickers as cards?  Probably so, since they occupy a spot in a page.  How about Broders and a few customs that I've printed out?  Yeah, there aren't that many to really influence the bottom line. 

So it's not going to be simple, but at the end, it'll be quite an accomplishment.  The other question is, do I record each set, player collection, team collection (by year), etc. next to their respective counts and thereby produce a detailed inventory too?  Not sure I'd really use it for much.  I'll keep my notes so I can refer back to them later if need be.

Have you counted your cards lately?  What complications did you run into?  How many did you end up with as a grand total?

Oh yeah, that one shelf put me at 20,600 already.