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using Skype
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My Office and Shop
I am very proud of my home office and storeroom/shop. When my bride and I sold our printing company in 1995, I set up a really nice home office behind our garage. It is a little larger than a regular 2-car garage. I also built a fairly decent storeroom behind my office. In 2005 my storeroom and the roof of my office was destroyed by Hurricane Rita. I put a lot of my own money with the money I got from the insurance company and built a dream storeroom/shop. It is about 650 sq. ft. As of January 2007 I'm still trying to get it organized, but it is really nice.
My office is fully equipped. I have two high end computer systems that are networked together as well as networked with my wife's computer, which is in her office. We have a Cannon mid-range copier that will copy 11" x 17" and will duplex 8.5" x 11". In addition, I have a small paper cutter, a 17" pocket laminator, a 9" pocket laminator, a saddle stapler that I use to staple my booklets, a GBC automatic punch and binding machine for booklets that I want to use a comb binding on, a professional ultra high resolution Epson printer, a high speed CD/DVD duplicator that will copy 5 CDs or DVDs in about one minute, and my pride and joy, a Primera Bravo high resolution CD/DVD printer/burner that I use to print my CD/DVD labels. I can put 25 CDs or DVDs in the hopper, design my label, and hit print. I walk away and when I come back a little later I have 25 beautifully printed disks. Finally, I have a scanner that I use to create images of my smaller items.
I also have a lot of shelving for my reference books and binders of autographs and a huge Ft. Knox safe that my more valuable items are in.
I enter the storage area from the back of my office. It is air conditioned and heated - as is the office. Lundia shelving runs down both sides and the middle with a workbench on one side and my shipping area that is in an offset area. About half of this area is well organized as I write this (January 2007). There is special shelving for each type of item I carry - Civil War relics, Ancient artifacts, Fossils and Minerals, Stamps, and Miscellaneous. At the back of the storeroom there is plenty of room for personal items that have nothing to do with business. My inventory of books for sale starts in the storeroom, with the first 500 or so on shelves near the ceiling. The remaining 2,500 to 3,000 books are in shelves in my wife's office.
The workbench has everything I need to do what I do, with the exception of woodworking tools. I have the woodworking tools in the garage because of the dust and sawdust they create. If I want to tumble and polish some minerals, I have my tumblers handy. I have a small lapidary saw that I can use to square off things like the matrix of fossil fish, cut small geodes, and do a little polishing. I've got a little shrink packaging machine to use when I have something that needs to be shrink packaged. I've got my framing tools to use when framing my displays. There are all kinds of hand tools that I find handy. I also use the workbench to put together my displays. Check out my free booklet on how to increase your profit by adding value to your auction items. It's in the free info area of this site. My latest "toy" is a gold plating machine.
On larger items that I cannot scan on my scanner, I have a couple of tools I use. One is a fold-open background and the other is the Cloud unit. I use my digital camera with both of these.
In my garage I have taken my half for my woodworking tools. I have a small bench saw, a drill press, a miter saw, and a shaper - plus a number of hand power tools. This is about all I need for what I do.
If I have any "real secrets," it's my experience in page makeup and typesetting gained from 40 years in the printing industry and not being afraid to invest in software and services.
I create all of my text in WordPerfect and use PageMaker 6.5 to create my displays, importing the Word Perfect text files. The reason I do this is that I like WordPerfect's dictionary which I have been adding to for over 20 years. Were I to be starting from scratch, I would probably do everything in PageMaker. I have both PageMaker 7 and InDesign, but much prefer PageMaker 6.5. I do most of my graphic work in PhotoShop, but am trying to learn how to use PaintShopPro.
A nice profit center is creating various eBooks and printed books. The eBooks I create using Acrobat Professional and the printed books I create in PageMaker and print on demand. In other words, when one is sold I print it. Or, if I list it as an auction item, I print it before listing and put it on my running auction shelf. These books are a maximum of 100 pages and, while not a major profit center, I still sell a few copies each month. Most are how-to, but I will write one about anything that hit my hot button or re-print interesting out-of-copyright books.
I spend a lot of time researching what I put on my displays and spend as much time writing my descriptions. I've found that the secret is a good picture(s) and a detailed description. Since most of my auction items are posted on eBay, I use their outstanding Seller Assistant Pro. SAPro will be discontinued soon and their new software, BTPro will be replacing it. BT is incredible, but has a long learning curve. I need to start that learning curve soon.
More recently I discovered Voice2Page.com. This is an incredible tool that enables me to put my own voice. This inexpensive service lets me literally talk to the visitors to my auctions. I can also use it on my web site, but as of this date I have not gotten to that yet except for the home page.
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