Hi everyone, I've lurked on here some and am a big fan of the Cardboard Corner and all the Sisterhood posts. I've been a lifelong Padres fan and have many great Murph memories. Unfortunately I don't live in San Diego anymore but still find ways to show my Padres Pride!

Last off-season I got a little bored and felt domesticated after buying a house. One thing I didn’t know what to do with was an Ikea Lilleberg coffee table I had in my divorced dad pad. My original idea was to coat the top with a bunch of Padres baseball cards. If you Google “baseball card coffee table you will get some hits and some pretty cool creations. So I bought some different glues, epoxies, laquers, polyurethanes, and other coatings and adhesives, but I wasn’t too happy with the results. On the bright side, the testing process trashed some crummy cards.

Fortunately, I had picked up a 2007 Topps hanger pack box that had those old flat sticks of crusty gum in them. Remember that stuff? I think Topps made it all in the 50’s and 60’s and might have finally run out of it since 2008 Heritage is the last time I’ve seen it. Anyway, I got the bright (or dim?) idea to make a border of that gum around the edge of the table, then put a piece of plexiglass on it. That way the cards can sit peacefully under the plexiglass but not be smashed since the gum raises it just enough.

After a lot of sanding, Gorilla Gluing the gum, more sanding, coats of polyurethane, here's the finished product (took a weekend, a cold weekend to sand gum):

Some up close shots:

The hardest part was choosing the cards!

The layout that worked best meant 81 cards in total, 60 vertical, 21 horizontal. The two rules I placed on myself were:

1) Span every year from 1969 to 2012 (Topps had just released the 2012 series 1)

2) No duplicate people (unless they are in a team card)

Yeah, there is only one Tony Gwynn in there (95 Leaf in front of the ivy), but there is a Tony and Chris card too,so I wasn’t too strict. Some other highlights: 1969 Dick Selma card was a fitting first card, the 1990 K-Mart All-Star Mark Davis, 1996 VJ Lovero of Cami breaking a bat, 1979 Eric Rasmussen (the Mr. Bean look alike), 1974 “Washington” Dave Hilton, and the Las Vegas Stars’ Keith Comstock “ouch card” which I put next to a Mark Grant…

Hope someone enjoys this as much as I did putting it together. Go Padres!