Well, that's pretty much the post. Today's Do Stuff Better is quick and easy - and for me, a long journey. I apologize if the rest of the world already does this, and somehow I missed the memo. It took me a while to figure out the best way to store our massive and ever expanding (like the universe) collection of games.

First, I just piled them all up, as, I thought, one does. Then, I used my trusty crate, which worked pretty well, but decreased accessibility by just a little. And every time Lou hauled the crate out to get a game - three to four times per day - she dinged up the book shelf a bit. So that had to go (and I needed the crate for Lou's Friendly Market anyway). But the crate did spark the vertical storage innovation. At first, I'd had the games stacked like normal inside the crate, but it was too much of a puzzle to get everything back together, especially for Lou. When I stored them vertically inside the crate, things became more seamless. And when I got rid of the crate, it occurred to me that I could still slide the games into the bookshelf vertically, even without a container. So I did, and it's awesome.

I know I'm pretty enthusiastic about this small fix, but let's do a quick count of the ways in which this is better than a stack, shall we? 1) You can see all of the games easily. 2) You can access one without interfering with any others. And, 3) possibly best of all, when you find pieces that missed clean up, there is actually a chance of putting them back into their correct box, instead of staring at the mess of games and placing it on top of the stack in the hopes you'll work up the motivation to unearth the correct game later, before the piece gets lost.

I still have one traditional horizontal stack of games, in the far corner. Those games were too big to stack vertically in this shelf, including our preternaturally large Scrabble and one of several large chess boards. The irony of these games, really, is the same as that of our preternaturally large book collection: When we play Scrabble, we play by passing the iPad back and forth (ok, actually by passing at least two devices with separate games back and forth, while streaming video on the Google TV, because a) we're nerds, and b) otherwise the game is toooo sloooow). Bret plays chess on his iPad too (though he will get out a board to visualize moves). And the last paper book I read is a distant memory. But we keep all this stuff around, in case the power goes out or something.

Then there are the smaller games that, as of yet, we're still playing without any digitization. Card games like Set, Uno and Hold 'Em are getting pretty heavy rotation around here these days, and we have other unsightly things in this collection, like travel Scrabble, Scrabble Dictionary and Bananagrams, along with non-Scrabble miscellania. I wanted to keep all this stuff accessible, but it was looking sort of sloppy on the shelves and driving me nuts.

I re-purposed a little woven basket to keep all this stuff tidy. It's better for when Lou throws the games back on the shelf - she can just toss them in here and things will still look neat.

You can see the felt strips I added to the bottom of the basket to protect the shelf. I'll move those back a bit on the bottom of the basket so they're not visible, but otherwise, that's pretty much a wrap on game storage.

If this was all just so obvious, I'm sorry for showing up late to the party, but if it's new to you too, try it! You'll be happy you did. If you have other tricks up your sleeve for storing games, do share.

And if you spot some changes in our living room since last we toured it, there are lots of things going on in here, and I am super, super happy with how it's shaping up. Yes, we're watching Little House on the Prairie, which we're also reading, and even accounting for all the racism I have to censor out in the books, they are so much better than the show. Anyway, more to come on the family room soon! Thanks for stopping by, and I'll see you tomorrow.