I updated my hobby workspace with a new modular storage solution

Four years ago I moved into a house that offered me the luxury of my own hobby workspace. I blogged a lot of happy thoughts about that here. Over the years my hobbyzone was slowly getting swamped with hobby stuff (I could have seen that one coming). It got to the point that a recent newsletter by Green Stuff World announcing a modular storage solution actually made me go: "you're right I do need that, put in shopping basket." I'm a sucker for advertising. Long story short: a box of laser cut MDF goodness arrived on the day I went on vacation. On return I went to work and ended up with this.

Ah a fresh workspace to mess up...

So with the 'after' photo out of the way (as per usual on this blog), let's not mince to many words and hop on over to where I was this Saturday (the 'before' photo).

My workspace before the update. Believe it or not, I actually try to keep things orderly.

Hm, looks mostly like I cleaned my desk from this distance ;). My previous set of MDF paint storage containers was made by TTCombat as they where the only ones back then that made a horizontal painting rack. Most other solutions are shaped like the bleachers in a sports stadium and take up a lot of desk space. It was a nice solution, but it missed corner pieces and had a few other things that didn't quite work as well as I wanted it to.

I use this side of the desk for assembling and basing. It reduces the amount of dirt and plastic clippings in my paints while painting.

Lets go for some close up inspections of my work area. The left hand side (my dirty work area) has become a storage area for half painted miniatures I expect to finish fairly soon. It's also the location of my Window Sill of Shame, but that has been flooded by basing materials. It also served as the storage area of my Warhound Titan. I lacked space for it. 

Bye bye tyrannosaurus, brontosaurus and velociraptor, hello Pikachu, Charmonder and Meowth.

For those of you wondering, I'm not a big fan of 'American Cuisine', but the kids are. And since my oldest one has moved from dinosaurs to Pokémon, I guess I'll be learning a whole range of new creature names soon. Anyway after a roadside dinner on vacation I couldn't resist saving a 'happy meal' box.

Quick, you have to catch them all! 

It gave me a chance to add a small critter called Pikachu to the kids' play area using a bit of tape and a few popsicle sticks. Looking up that name makes me feel rather old. Perhaps I should just expose the 6 year old to Jurassic Park and hope that instead of having nightmares, he'll get obsessed by dinosaurs again. Anyway, let's get back to painting miniatures. 

To be quite honest, my workspace became such a mess I stopped using my wet palette because I couldn't figure out where to put the lid. 

Paints and models encroached my painting area to the point where I was sort of relegated to sitting in an awkward corner, desperately trying to get the paint pots back into their racks. Unfortunately there wasn't enough space for all of them. A slow move away from (most) Games Workshop paints with their damnable lids to dropper bottles, made my storage racks not quite as useful as they were.

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, it was a few dozen paint pots rapping, rapping on my desk. Long poem short, I cried out 'Nevermore'. 

Aside from that I skipped anchoring these paint rack to the walls. This is what happened while cleaning out my painting area. Trust me, it also happened (thankfully infrequently) while painting. Pro-tip: anchor your storage to the wall. The white board with oval holes is an Ikea storage thing that looked really useful but - in keeping with Ikea tradition - wasn't. Anything hanging from it was liable to fall of on touch. I had some unhappy times trying to take a bottle cap from a storage container only to watch the entire container fall down onto a half painted miniature (again). 

So clean and sparkly, I should just stop painting I think.

 Anyway I cleared the entire workspace and took a sponge and some cleaner to the desktop as well. Sparkly!

For some reason I always find Nurglings while cleaning up.

In keeping with tradition I also found a cheeky Nurgling hiding between the pots on my paint station. That's the thing with Nurglings, they are always closer than you think...this one needs a new paint job I think.

Oh goody, flat pack furniture for hobbyists! 

At this point I had already spent most of my morning cleaning the area and carting stuff out. There was a lot of stuff to cart out... Perhaps I should mention that I thought updating my workspace would take me about the entire morning. I'm quite convinced that my inability to properly estimate how much time things take has had a beneficial effect on both my DIY and hobby skills. I start with happy surety it'll only take a morning and then just soldier on (over days or weeks), slowly discovering how much time it really takes. In this case it took me an entire weekend to update the workspace.

I never quite understood the whole 'Ikea is hard to assemble'-trope. Just work orderly, follow the pictures and you're golden. The same applies here. GSW's modular sets are a joy to work with.

Anyway it was time to assemble flat pack furniture for painters. I think you're supposed to be able to assemble these things without glue, but I always have PVA standing around and it is rather nice to actually use it on wood for once. Also I want my paint racks to last and last (and last) and glue helps there.

One last check if I properly followed the instructions...

One of the things that took more time than expected was giving in to my tendency to do 'side quests'. In this case I fixed a lot of minor irritations I experienced over the years. For instance I drilled a new hole in the desktop to properly manage the cables from my monitor. I also reworked the amount of available power sockets and did some extra cable management on the power block I use to power my ultrasonic cleaner, Dremel and hair dryer. 

And the lot fits against the wall. I glued this entire contraption together and then used the clamps provided by GSW to make the fit even cleaner. It works like a charm.

I did a quick fit to see if all my calculations on the wall where correct. For those of you sniggering on seeing this (like my wife): it was supposed to overlap my desk! (Oh dear, on writing this I see why this sounds like a terrible excuse). Green Stuff World includes handy holes to fix the racks to the wall and I wanted to maximize my paint rack real estate. 

I anchored these shelves to the wall as well. No more falling storage solutions for me! 

I added extra planks to the side of my 'dirty area'. I still have to replace the sagging plank with too many books above that. 

My god machine stands safely on its own plank (I still half expect the plank to fall off the wall again at some point, let's hope that's just me being a pessimist). 

As I had both the hammer drill and the regular cordless drill out, I figured I should do something to properly store my titan (I ran out of storage space in my display cases about a year and half ago, and I really don't know what to get rid off next). I fixed a little Ikea plank (of the sort that is really f'íng hard to properly fix) to the wall. Symmetry be damned, it looks good there.

So many pretty colors, I wonder how many times I'll be rearranging them before hitting on the best order to put them in.

Next came the hard task of testing all my GW pots and tossing the ones that had dried out due to lid failure (quite a lot actually). I also got rid of (almost) all my GW metallics because Vallejo makes better ones and I only use the extremely silver silvers by GW these days. Besides most of those had dried out as well (lid failure again). After that I arranged my scale color and Vallejo colors by....erm...color :). Big pots like my primer bottles fit on the shelf on top above the racks. And...

Ha ha! A hidden extra paint rack, and the door to the Billy actually still opens too.

I actually repurposed one of my old paint racks onto the wall to store my GW Airbrush colors (never use them, but have a lot), my Contrast paints and their glazes and technical paints I actually use quite frequently. I also had a little bit of space for my small collection of P3 paints (they don't actually fit this rack properly, but lets not talk about that) For those of you wondering about the picture on top of the paint rack (and the ones on the door). I tend to print interesting looking paint jobs I spot on the internet and tape those pictures around my workspace for inspiration. 

I hoped for more Forge World Masterclass books four years ago. Unfortunately it turns out that 'hope is the first step on the road to disappointment' holds true in that regard.

The last bit of work consisted of reassembling the 'dirty area. Now give me another two days and the entire workspace will be a horrifying mess again :). Lets finish this long winded story with some bulleted lists. I'm quite happy with the racks Green Stuff World makes. I found only two downsides: 

• My Liquitex inks don't fit between the shelves of the corner system without squeezing the rubber tops down. I store these outside the racks (but would've loved to be able to fit them).
• The holes in the back of the rack holding GW pots are not reachable from the front, making it impossible to anchor these using screws. I glued my two racks to their neighbors (and hope for the best). Perhaps I should've used hooks in the wall but I didn't have those on hand during construction (and I was too lazy to drive to the DIY store). 

Let's finish up with some upsides too:

• You have the choice to store dropper bottles upside down or downside up. I like the upside down option as I've convinced myself this will stop the bottle tops from clogging during storage.
• The corner sections end years of having a unused bit of corner on my workspace. I know it sounds small, but it nagged at me :).
• They were quite easy to assemble (excluding the GW pot holder racks, those where a bit fiddly) and came with excellent instructions. 

With all the construction out of the way and another week of vacation time ahead, I'm off to do something about all those half-finished models on the workspace...or should I construct something new? Ah this silly hobby :)