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This jokingly came to me when I was buying some doujinshi while a friend was with me. He asked "don't you have enough of this stuff already?" Of course, being a collector, the answer is no. But, I did tell him "The only problem is that I've officially ran out of room for this stuff. Now it'll probably just sit and collect on the floor like my figure collection. Sooner or later I might end up on the hoarders tv show." I told him afterwards "while walking through the neatly stacked piles of anime goods, I can tell the tv people, but this is stuff I do want to keep! I don't have a problem!"
Haha...that's almost what happened. My newly bought doujinshi sits on two desk. But, I do have a large stack of figures on the floor in my home that just grows since I did run out of space to either display or put the boxes away.
As any serious anime collector knows, shelf space is always a premium. You can't keep adding shelves, well, you can, but, at some point, you won't be able to. We love to keep buying stuff related to the hobby, but the space to store such things keeps dwindling. At some point, you have a few options - move to a bigger place (not always financially possible and at some point that bigger place will be filled to the brim), sell/give away stuff (sometimes that's hard to do) or rent storage (always a possibility that sort of strikes the middle-ground between the first two options).
Personally, I like to keep everything handy and close so I've painstakingly chosen option 2 - sell/give away stuff. Sell the old and make room for the new. I'm doing this because I have come to the realisation that if I didn't start to sell/give away stuff, my place would start to look like a place of a hoarder (no, I don't have a problem! :D) - possibly in neater piles. If you keep buying and not removing the old...eventually the room will overtaken by anime goods (not necessarily a bad thing, especially if you have a pile of pillows fall on top of you. haha).
I have been curious to actually see a place of a true anime hoarder. It's probably similar to any other type of thing people hoard. Oh wait...we're collectors not hoarders. Nevermind. :D
Anyone else have the space to goods dilemma?
I also have a suspended ceiling which I am somewhat surprised hasn't collapsed under the weight of all the toys I have suspended from it- and yes my ceiling is almost out of room as well.
As cluttered as it all sounds, it hasn't got to the point where I can barely move around the place. most of it seems to be confined to islands of stuff tucked in near those desks. I've also been getting rid of stuff as well - mostly books and comics at the moment.
The one thing that's slightly disheartening is that some of the stuff I've got shut of were things I loved many years earlier. These were special and important at one time and now I don't mind seeing them go. I got rid of my whole collection of Ninja Turtles, Ghost Rider and Silver Surfer comics not too long ago. When I think of all the time, effort and money I'd spent building my collection, as well as the enjoyment I had reading the things, it seems a bit of a waste to be getting rid of it all. Makes me wonder what current favourite things might go several years down the road...
Ah, excuse me, seems I'm a bit on the melancholic side today.