It’s only been a year and chance since I moved into my house, but I haven’t really done anything with my office. Sure, I made and installed my wall of belts, and hung a few frames on the walls, in addition to positioning the futon and setting up a space for my computer. But I still had a lot of boxes sitting in the closet along with general ideas for lots of little trinkets and nerdy figurines that I had imagined displaying in whatever room I’d designate as my office, that I simply never bothered really getting to.
Another thing I decided to do while mythical gf was out of the country was to finally do something with my office space, and get it to a point beyond where it was just a whole bunch of boxes stacked in a corner with just a computer and a wall of wrestling belts. A few posts ago, I touched on the hanging wall shelves that I had put together, which are in place and I’m generally happy with, even though I underestimated a little bit just how many Rito figures that I had and how much space they’d take up.
So among the things not making the cut of the above picture are two shelves that I purchased and installed; neither are particularly impressive things, but more like essentials in order to get a degree of organization for all my various personal effects. The obstacle I faced with my primary shelf was that I had some general dimensions that I did not want to exceed in any capacity so that I could retain as much open floor space as possible but still be able to have a place to hold some shit.
At first, I had resigned myself that storage cubes would be the most logical shelving solution for what I had in mind, but after a lot of digging on various sites, it was Amazon of all places where I found this shelf that fit into my dimensional parameters, and definitely looked like it had way more character than the cubes that just about everyone in my generation has from Ikea, Target or Walmart. Not to mention I loved the faux-incomplete half edges on opposite ends that definitely gives it some personality as well flexibility in case something is a little wider than the surface area.
I only needed one row and the top to display stuff like nice figures and photo frames, and I didn’t have a lot of printed materials that exceeded the smaller shelf spaces, that didn’t quite fit into my library shelf elsewhere, so that left the entire bottom row available for general storage. I got these storage bins to store shit like camera equipment, electronic peripherals and art supplies, but also looking a little bit nicer than the army of cardboard printer paper boxes they’d all been sitting in previously.
Also not pictured is this wall shelf that I hung to the wall in a narrow space, as a place to fit a variety of smaller figurines and collectible things, that I don’t have the space to put them on my current desk table. I like how dynamic it looked, and it has a Pieter Mondrian-like inspiration to it that jived with my tastes for this space.
Now to those people who aren’t really wrestling fans and aren’t immediately drawn to the belt wall might not notice, but the wall is actually different than the last time I ever posted a photograph of it; there are more belts on it. A long time ago, after I secured an ECW Tag Team Championship replica, I told myself that ten belts was a nice round number, and that I should probably stop. The belts are definitely not at all cheap, and it’s not lost on me that as much as I love them, they’re really kind of worthless overall.
But then over the last few years in particular, I’ve grown quite fond of NXT as well as much of New Japan Pro Wrestling as I can get without having to pay for it. I remember watching the Johnny Gargano vs. Andrade Cien Almas match back at TakeOver: Philadelphia and immediately telling myself that I should get an NXT championship replica. And as much as I’ve grown to resent Bullet Club today, I’m not going to deny that I think Kenny Omega is a pretty incredible performer and his trifecta of matches with Kazuchika Okada over the IWGP World Championship made it very easy to be inspired to want to add that belt to my collection as well.
Long story short, I got replicas of both. I did some freelance a while back so that I could have some actual fuck-you-money to do whatever the hell I wanted to with it, and ultimately I wanted something tangible and something I would enjoy as long as possible, and I’m a pretty simple person so the answer was obviously moar belts. So I got replicas of both belts, and they’re now up on the wall as well; I had to take all of the belts down to reconfigure, but I got them up and they’re all fairly reasonably spaced to look consistent and deliberate.
The biggest thing is obviously the gigantic Jinx on the wall, but that’s naturally the point. I had thought about what I wanted to put on that particular wall and frankly it had stumped me for a while. I debated on getting some oversized portraits of like cityscapes of like Atlanta, or Seoul or any place that I could have some relation with, but one, I couldn’t find any that I really liked, and two, even if I had, they would’ve been balls expensive. And then I thought that I didn’t want any more framed stuff on the wall, because I already had a ton, and the cost of frames was getting expensive.
I think it was seeing David Choe on Ugly Delicious that made me start thinking mural, and then I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. A mural would definitely be something that was different; but then I remembered that I don’t have a lot of confidence in my traditional illustrative and painting abilities, and that committing to trying to do my own mural seemed like a gargantuan undertaking. I also don’t exactly have Facebook stock or any form of lucrative compensation to offer someone to do it for me, either so the idea was starting to lose steam.
But then I thought about large scale adhesive printing. I could then pick something that looked cool, not have to design, draw and color it myself, have it printed, and then simply slap it onto the wall.
Naturally, this itself took a considerable amount of time because I’m sometimes indecisive and overthink things, and I analyze things a million times to make sure that my opinions don’t change too much over time. But looking through folders of saved images throughout the years, I came across this picture of Jinx that I always loved, because it was like a perfect blend of a character I still love, colors, sass and personality; not to mention that the general proportions of the image appeared to fit in the space I wanted to have a graphic for. It didn’t take long for me to simply pull the trigger on this image, but naturally it took a little longer to pick a company that could print in this size and not sexually assault my wallet in the process.
Now I will say that I’m not 100% satisfied with the quality of my graphic, as even after just the first day, the adhesion quality is definitely not up to satisfaction. I did have a fix for it that is working, but this is probably what I get for being swayed by cost, although there’s no guarantee that any other company would’ve done any better. But for that reason, I’m not going to link to them, because I don’t really wish to support them any further beyond my original business.
However, I am happy with how the overall product looks when it’s at its best. It fills the wall space as perfect as I had measured it, and it’s colorful and sassy and it has a lot of personality all wrapped into a character I’ve always enjoyed.
As a whole, I’m happy to have worked on my office some, and I’m generally very pleased with how it looks now. The only thing left is to find some sort of shelving solutions for the closet in the room, so that I can have an efficient place to store actual work and important papers, as well as all the other things that are meant to go into closets and not be on display. But I did spend a little bit of coin on doing this much, and I’m going to have to wait a little bit before going forward with the closet. Hopefully, that won’t take another year before I decide to get to it, but then again this is my house; what’s the rush?
