As of late, I’ve been buying 45s from eBay. I’ve been getting mixed lots, so most of the time I don’t really know what I’m getting, and that’s part of the fun. I’m looking for mostly 1980s stuff, because that’s one of my favorite decades for music. Anyway, it’s been quite an adventure. I have duplicates of quite a few singles, but for the most part I’m getting singles that are new to my collection. The condition varies quite a bit from record to record. And, vinyl is funny: sometimes, I’ll look at a record and think, “This will never play. It looks terrible!” and then it plays just fine. Other ones look pristine, and then suddenly there’s a skip. You just never know.

So, I’ve been re-organizing, cataloging, sorting and cleaning records over the past few weeks, and so my office at home looks a bit like a record shop right now.

I bought a Groovmaster label saver so I could clean the records that have some surface dirt on them, and it’s awesome. It’s much less expensive to clean records using good old Dawn dish soap and warm water, and it works well, too. I’ve got a pretty large stack to go through, unfortunately, so it may take me a while. I wasn’t able to “save” some of the 45s that had significant surface scuffs, but for the most part the records are working just fine.

I also finally bought some shelving to hold all of my LPs and 12″ singles. They were kind of scattered around the house in different bookshelves, crates and what-not. It’s so nice to have all of my records in one place.

I have no idea when this big organizing and cleaning project will be complete, but it’s fun and it keeps me busy.