You're missing stock!
Dunno about the ideal location but I struggled real bad to do home electronics until I bought one of those cabinets with loads of little draws and labelled and filled them with the E12 resistor series from Ohms to Mega Ohms, A bunch of matching PNP and NPN transistors - some signal some power, common capacitors and other doodads like leds, POTs, diodes, some prototyping board, a bunch of common chips like 555 and 741, 5V regulators and these days the odd Atmel with a well known boot loader on it 
etc etc
These days I have a study room with shelves and shelves of old derelict junk but every new project is made from about 90% parts from that original unit of miniature draws. I can often get a new idea up and running without having the hassle of ordering up a load of bits and having to wait form them to be delivered.