Orderly and Confused pt 1

My collection is one that has taken me 40+ years to acquire.  The pace at which I collect these days is much less than previous so I spend more time trying to trade than trying to buy.  There are more gaps in the collection than I'd like to admit so trading through these channels has allowed me to get closer and closer to my OCD completion of what I have surrounding me.  My baseball card collection is structured.  As you view this panoramic view of the room set aside for my cards, they appear to be just boxes on shelves.

Upon a closer look, starting at the bottom left, they are all in order by year, alphabetically by company with one exception.  Topps as the mainstay of every year, is the first set you come to in each year.  After Topps, sweet alphabetical, structured order.  Once you reach the lower right shelf of the left section, moving up the order continues going left, then up, then right, and so on and so on zig-zagging across the room.  Now if I could only say the cards within those boxes were also in order, that would be a miracle.  I've started to make that a reality by going backwards from 2013 but I think I've been stuck on 2005 for six months.

Once you reach the bottom right of the picture, that is where things start to unravel.  The randomness of what is left just sits there without attention, without structure, without a sense of being.  In this area are random cards and other card related items.  Nothing that would warrant being put into the structure of the rest of the area.  What you don't see in the picture is behind the camera.  200-300 boxes of hockey cards that have gone unattended for 10 years.  That's another post sometime down the road.  The magnitude of this collection is one that my wife's friends and family look at in awe.  Wondering why a 40+ year old guy collects cards thought of as kids stuff.  And for those that collect and enjoy the hobby, nothing else needs to be said.

It's one thing to have the random cards that will never make there way into the system you see as 30 cards from the 1998 Skybox Thunder set won't get any more completed.  Those will sit until there is a person looking for these in trade or I decide to rid myself of thousands of cards at once.  Also part of what you don't see are the double rowed shoebox sized boxes that hold the autos, jersey and bat cards among other memorabilia cards that have filtered into the mix.  And these are where I begin to lose my mind with the structure of the collection. 

Part 2 of this post which will cover that next question of order.  One that no matter which direction I take, it will not be an acceptable answer to me.  Until the next post...............