GR III - The Final Shelf of Discovery

And so, following the success of Operation Garage, I can actually reach the final unexplored shelf  and I could quest to find the mother load of my wargaming memories.  Stories are told of chests full of toy soldier gold hidden somewhere among the old dusty relics of a house move.  so like an slightly agen Indiana Jones I began to climb the rickety step ladder of the ancients (well the previous owners of the house left it behind 10 years ago, to be fair they were quite old) to search

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The shelf which promises so much

The area my intelligence sources lead me to believe the 'stuff' may reside 

I started at the end where I didn't really expect to find anything, and my expectations were well placed unless you count boxes of MG and Mini magazines, original sales brochures for the same, a child sized sewing machine (!) and SWMBO's childhood Lego (still with the original boxes).

The first finds were the easy low hanging fruit of the search, 3 choppers from the early issues of Helicopter magazine to go with the others already stashed in the new in their new home, a Blackhawk, a Seaking and another Chinook.  A good start.

SeaKing

Chinook

Black Hawk

Next up an small box which peaked my interest as I had no idea of it's contents. As I opened the flaps I was greeted with big bubble wrap and polystyrene chips and sneaky peaks of a gaudily painted building......

Mmmm wonder what this could be?

To my very pleasant surprise a more or less complete Airfix 1/72 Waterloo Farmhouse, all be it with a nice coating of sloppily applied enamel paint.

Ooooooo shiney.  Airfix Waterloo Farmhouse

The next was a box I knew contained gaming paraphenalia, I just wasn't sure exactly what.  On the lid was written a guide to its contents, hills, trees & shubbery, broken cork and some tanks.  But would this be accurate?

Would this live up to its promise?

Well to be honest it wasn't far off.  A couple of bags stuffed with lichen for shrubs and trees, another bag of broken cork and various sized flocked polystyrene hills.  In addition there was most of a bag of bright green flock and an unopened Airfix Churchill Mk VII - so one tank rather than some tanks.

Bags full of goodness, slightly faded goodness but still of use.

A hill and a churchill

So another box another piece of childhood memories, this time a whole heap of Action Man goodness.  Bits of uniforms and heaps of guns and bazookas an other miscellaneous equipment, all manner of Palitoy goodness.  In the layers below were some, but weirdly not all, of my old Action Men.  Time has not been kind to them and some have suffered a form of plastic rot which has seen the part which connects the head snap.

Ready for action

And down came the next box, a large white carrier bag stuffed in the top concealed the contents.  Pulling the bag open I was greeted with masses of Britains Deetail, Airfix and Timpo Wild West-ness.  As a child I played for hours and hours with my 'cowboy and indians' (I know that's not pc, but that's what they were called when I was a kid).  I used to pool them with my best mate and there would literally be hundreds of them.

Ooooooooo a great big bag of the Wild West

One of the favourites was the bandits/outlaws/injuns attacking the railroad, and under the bag of figures was my Timpo Prairie Rocket, carriages and track.  It was in somewhat worse condition than I remember, well the loco at least. 

All aboard.

And as a little bonus extra there was a tiny plastic bag with the rather hard to come by Airfix 1/72 Astronauts.  Sweet.

A small step for man, a giant leap for mankind.....

In the spirit of modern sequels I'm going to split the final instalment in to two separate 'episodes'.  So I'll sign off this instalment with a final picture

and a

*SWMBO = She Who Must Be Obeyed = The Trouble & Strife = Her Indoors = The Good Lady Wife

Operation Garage

Some of you may recall my recent ranting post about my company closing down my nice seaside office and moving us 30+ miles to a picturesque business and retail park on the M61 (if not you can read all about it here).  Well in the interests of reuse and environmentally friendly policies pretty much all the office furniture is being trashed!  It's 20-30 years old but really good quality and much of it is still in really good nick, but apparently there is no market for it to even be given away.  Mmmmmmmmmmmm.

Now my garage has become a dumping ground, it used to be nice and tidy with a place for everything and everything in its place, but things have slipped and it is, quite frankly, a mess.  And so my mind hatched a plan of repurposing the office storage for my garage storage, with the permission of the site support manager (well he said I could take a couple of cabinets and a chair if I was discrete).  Thus was launched

Operation Garage!!!

Taking stock

It's a mess.

Boy is it a mess.

It's a panoramic mess

I figured I could easily get one of the double cabinets in the back of my car but then discovered that they were in fact modular in nature and I would be able to take them apart and get 2 in my car at a time and then rebuild them at home, as well as make them 4 units high.  So over the next few weeks as the site wound down and cabinets became empty I worked late broke them down and spirited them away to my garage.  Originally I was going for maybe half a dozen, in the end I have 15 of them - oops how did that happen.

First job I figured was to get the old cabinets out and put the new ones in so that I could then put stuff away.  I figured I'd tackle the left side first as there wasn't quite as much stuff on this side.  I wont bore you all with a step by step account of how I moved stuff, removed other stuff and assigned stuff to be binned.  But suffice to say I ended up with a lot of stuff to be binned.

2 car loads worth for the local tip

With the new cabinets in place and stuff getting slowly but surely sorted through and put away, but this was really starting to take far longer than I had planned it to.

So it has actually taken several months to finish as other things came along to divert my attention, and then there was Christmas and the numerous parties and wotnot.  But I am pleased to say I actually finished before the end of the year..... just.

Panoramic tidy now

Floor, there is a floor!

Ahh the fans, well they were being thrown away as well as the new office has aircon, be a shame to waste them and I can always put them on evil bay.

The big yellow box is one of SWMBO's school projects, already robbing space before the place was even finished.

Unpacking the final Garage Raiding finds (more on that in another blog entry).  

Somewhere under there is the Afghan compound I was working on some time ago, there will be some progress on that now I've finished the garage.  There is plenty of space now for me to have multiple projects on the go in the expansion of the Painting Bureau.

Plenty of storage my toys with 3 full cupboards of storage and a drawer.

The mahoooosive cardboard tube is another nice find from the office shut down, not really sure what I will use it for but I can see a stone dunn or suchlike.

There's even a cupboard for my old games and books

So from the above you will gather that there will soon be entries for the final instalment of Garage Raiding (yet to be written with another snappy title) and something around that Afghan compound.  So stop back soon peeps.