Now, this is a card table a collector can deal with.
Like many collectors, Anthony Weston of Blair, Nebraska, has plenty of duplicate cards. But what to do with them? Trade them? Perhaps. Sell them? If they are everyday commons, they won’t fetch much on eBay, so that option is unlikely.
Instead, Weston, 37, decided to create a coffee table topped with baseball, basketball and football cards. He used Modge Podge glue and PolyGlass resin to create a card-topped table that is certain to be a conversation piece.
“It’s something to do with cards you don’t need and want,” Weston said.
Weston remembers seeing a similar project three or four years ago on Twitter or Pinterest and was intrigued.
“Someone used cards to create a countertop on their bar,” Weston said. “I thought it was cool.”
Weston is hoping to use the table, which he finished on May 29, as a way to help raise money for flood victims in the Midwest. Floods along the Mississippi, Missouri and Arkansas rivers have been devastating this year, and Weston hopes to sell the table during a sale that will benefit people displaced by the angry waters.
His company’s office in Fremont, Nebraska, already was destroyed by the rise of the Platte River.
Weston works for Encor, a company of direct support professionals for people with physical and mental disabilities. The company is based out of Omaha, but Weston works out of a satellite office in Blair, which is located northwest of the city. Weston got some of the people who benefit from Encor’s support to put the table together.
Weston bought the table from a Goodwill store near his home.
“They usually have three or four of them and you can work with one and sand it down,” Weston said.
The table itself is adorned with 50 cards, all randomly picked by the people who helped Weston.
“There was one box filled with commons that was not organized at all,” Weston said. “The people I worked with picked the cards.
“There was no rhyme or reason to them.”
Before you have a heart attack, there are no high-ticket cards preserved on these tables. Weston estimated the most expensive card was “probably a $3 card.”
“I think some guy on Twitter criticized me for using a Deion Sanders rookie card,” Weston said. “But come on, they’re all mass produced from that era.”
Weston began collecting cards during that era when baseball cards were flowing from Topps, Donruss and Fleer.
“Nolan Ryan was what got me started in baseball cards,” he said. “To me, he looked like he was an old man.
“But there was those 1990 Topps cards of Ryan and his 5,000th strikeout.”
In addition to Ryan, Weston was a big fan of Kansas City Royals star George Brett.
But while he collected baseball cards – “I mowed a lot of lawns to earn money to buy baseball cards” — football is Weston’s passion. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool fan of Nebraska Cornhuskers football, and growing up in Stapleton, Nebraska, that’s understandable. Stapleton is a town that had 305 people in the 2010 census and is located halfway between Omaha and Cheyenne, Wyoming.
There was no question who Weston was going to root for.
“I lived and breathed Husker football,” he said. “I was extremely spoiled growing up with Nebraska football.”
In between collecting cards and rooting for the Big Red, Weston attended the University of Nebraska Omaha for a year before graduating with a business degree from Omaha-based Metropolitan Community College in 2006.
Weston enjoys working in the business sector and enjoys making card-topped tables. He certainly enjoys the compliments he received on social media.
“It kind of blew up on Twitter,” Weston said. “People want to know how to make them.”
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