The storage was smelling funny for a few months now, it's a damp place that gets no sunlight, so I always thought that was normal.. But two days ago I noticed a brown mold growing on the wooden bookshelf I use to store things in. When I pulled it aside, the wall it was against was knee high black/brown mold. In shock I went around checking the things, and found out that pretty much all cardboard boxes were covered with brown/white mold, all the walls were molded and the paint was peeling away, and some of the boxes had mold IN THEM, the most heartbreaking was to see that the boxes containing my big box games were infested and the games themselves had molds on the box covers...
So last night, I put on the gloves and dove right in, took most of the stuff out. Half the cardboard boxes were disintegrating, so I binned them and their contents. I think I threw away maybe 100 lbs of (non-retro) stuff that were impossible to clean. I then did a general clean up of the room, and the cardboard boxes. Then I spent two hours individually wiping down each game I own, and placed them in double zip-lock IKEA plastic bags (I even had the disks ziplocked inside the ziplocked boxes in some cases). I went to bed at 3 in the night, feeling very sore but slept peacefully for the first time in the last few days..
I also have five 50l plastic storage boxes on order, they will replace most of the cardboard boxes that remain. Then this weekend, I will go back in, move everything out and do a THOROUGH bleacking of the whole place.
TL;DR: My storage was infested with mold, I had to throw away a lot of stuff but secured my game collection. Check your storages for mold, it's disgusting, gets everywhere and spreads incredibly fast.
