Updated Work Space

Juggling a family, career, and all of the normal responsibilities of life generally leaves little time for actually painting and working on miniatures.  The upshot is my son is finally getting to an age where he can join me in painting and model building, so that may actually open up a little more time going forward.  That being said, my previous work area was a mess, a disaster, a complete fiasco given form.  Therefore I decided that if I was going to get anything actually accomplished, it was well past time to get everything cleaned up and finally organized... and for the people closest to me, that last bit elicited gasps and cries of disbelief.  

I looked around until I found a set of shelves and desks that I thought would actually work for me.  I ended up going the Ikea route as they had some shelves with desks that were designed to attach directly to them. They also had organizing bins that were designed to fit well within the cubbies of the shelves themselves.  I therefore steeled myself and began a multi-week odyssey of building, moving, rearranging, wall painting, and then cataloging every single unpainted or partially painted miniature I had into its own box and putting it all into a database.  Yes, Virginia, when I go around the bend, I REALLY go around the bend.

In the end I determined I really needed two working surfaces - one for painting, and one for building.  This would let me segregate the paints from the building rigs and give me enough space to have more than one project going at a time.  

This is the painting area.  You can see that there are still some openings for future additions.  You can also tell that my son and I like to build Lego.  I added several Back-2-Base-IX organizers as these let me keep all of my different paints somewhat organized (baby steps!).  

Here's the building area.  I have a few projects going on the tabletop at this point (PAVN T-54's are currently up, but if you look carefully there are a few other things hiding around.  I have a couple of my old project trays that are still in use, but I plan to ultimately get rid of those once the projects are complete.

The new set-up actually seems to be working for me so far.  I have a bit more organization to do, but I'm actually to a point to where I can start working on "stuff" again... and I can't tell you how good that feels!