900 Transformers and counting

I've been a Transformers fan since I was about eight years old, back when Hasbro released the first series of figures in 1984. I wasn't what I would have called a "collector" at the time, but I picked up as many as I could afford on my allowance through the early years. They ended up being well-worn aids to my imagination. I still have all but two of my original "Generation One" figures, although they aren't in the best condition now. When I really started "collecting" them was when I moved out of the house after high school and started college in '96. The Beast Wars series was just getting started, and I bought just about every figure I could find in the local stores. I've been collecting ever since, although not to be a completest. I just pick up the figures that really catch my eye or have some homage to the earlier characters that I still love.

So, to the point of this blog. My wife and I have recently moved into a new house, one that we had custom built for us (and have put quite a bit of our own work into completing). We're still in the process of finishing up the minor details, like window trim and painting a few rooms. But one of the things I was able to do in the design was to make sure my new office had plenty of display space for my Transformer collection. When we lived in our first house, somewhere in 2004, I was able to fit the collection along one wall and roughly three shelves of a spare bedroom.



By the end of 2006 I had moved to the larger office/bedroom in the basement, where the figures took up three shelves along a much longer wall and around part of a second wall.



When we ended up moving in 2007 I took with me seven completely full 18-gallon Sterilite (like Rubbermade) containers of my beloved Transformers. Three years later, we're starting to unpack in the new place. I have nine full 18-gallon containers, plus some still boxed figures that would probably fill most of a tenth tub.



I put together a database on my Handspring Visor that converted over to my two Sony Clie PDAs and now resides on my iPod Touch. It isn't 100% accurate, as I've found from time to time, but it's pretty close, and that's where the title of this blog comes from. If the calculations are still correct, I have just over 900 individual Transformers figures that I'll be setting up on shelves over the coming month (or more). That's a lot of plastic to pull out, dust off, re-configure and set in place! I'll be taking my time to cross-reference my database at the same time, getting everything back to an accurate count as I go. I'll be adding entries to this blog as the process continues, from putting the shelving up all the way through to placing the very last figure.

So, wish me luck and follow along as I start a journey back down my own personal memory lane, Transformers style!