Planning the Hobby Room, Attempt Number Six

I Have a Finishing Problem

I’m putting this at the front of the video, because I think I legitimately have a problem. I’ve been cleaning and eBaying for months, and I’ve sold a lot of Warhammer and miniatures, and I’m in the final stretch. But as I’m going through it now, I’m finding unfinished project after unfinished project.

And it’s not only the hobby. I’ve got five books going on Goodreads between real books and audiobooks. I’m in the middle of three different Greek books I’m studying. I’m in the middle of a few other weird books I’m studying that I’m not going to talk about. Nothing in my life is getting done. I just start a new thing, new thing, new thing, and I don’t finish any of them, and it’s hitting me pretty hard.

It was hitting me before, but I couldn’t name it. Now that I can, the goal is to get all this cleaned up for real, 100% done, and then start finishing things. Is that wisdom? I don’t know. It’s time to turn this mess into a studio instead of a room I throw stuff into.

Six Attempts In

I’ve started this process six times. Not today, but six times across the history of this channel I’ve recorded myself saying it’s time to clean this place up and make a real studio. I never actually finish, and then I mess it all up again. So hopefully today’s the day.

I’m somebody who has to write everything down. Hang on, I’ve lost my pen. That’s what this pocket is for. It’s the pen pocket.

My grocery store put a bunch of composition notebooks on sale for about two bucks, and it’s graph paper, and the graph paper takes fountain pens, which is crazy. So I bought a ton of them. I’m going to sit down and approach this differently.

Sorted Is Not the Same as Usable

I’ve done the version where you just put stuff away. I get the space clean, but the space itself is never usable. I never get it doing what I want it to do.

It looks crazy over there, but it’s all sorted now, so that’s progress. Everything’s in boxes. I took everything off the shelves except those books right there and put it on the floor, sorted, and that’s where it’s been sitting for a couple of weeks. I have to put it all back, but I want to rearrange it so I actually get something out of the room.

Also, finishing our Tanner Simpson miniature puts us at 31 painted, which seems like it should be so much more. That’s the eye-opening part. If I’d finished everything I’ve started painting on this channel, not even counting the goblins, we’d be closer to 100. I have to get stuff finished. And part of that is that the space is as scattered as my brain is.

The Ceiling Fan Problem

Blank canvas, rough start. I’m not an engineer, so every box on the graph paper is a square foot. The big room is 20 and a half feet one way and 15 the other. There are double doors into a smaller room that’s about 5 feet in, and I ran out of boxes. That smaller room is pretty squared away already.

I marked out the ceiling fan and made a card for it so I could set it on top of the plan. I joke about it, but I walk into that fan every single day. At least three times a week, and I only come down here four times a week.

Normally I wouldn’t put a big gaming table right there. But the fan and the lights are directly above it, which means better light on the table. What worried me is the fan is three and a half feet across with the blades, so if I’m standing at the table, am I going to have those things right on my head?

I checked, because that’s basically the setup right now. When I’m standing at the table I don’t notice the blades at all. I’ve never been hit while I’m playing. Only while I’m walking. So the table stays under the fan.

What the Room Needs to Do

I made little cutouts of all the furniture that matters. Two big bookshelves, roughly a foot by foot each on the plan. A 2 by 1 shelf that was tucked in front of the door, which is a terrible spot, and was supposed to be temporary and became not temporary. My big toolbox with all the paints and hobby supplies. Everything else in here is on wheels, and anything on wheels goes under the gaming table.

What I actually need out of the room is an airbrush booth, a painting and building and assembly space, and the big table. That table does Warmachine, anything that needs 6 by 4, or a 2 by 2 thrown on top. Any game I want to play, I can play on it.

And I want to keep it clean. I want to stop using half of it for storage so I can leave a game set up and take a turn here and there, especially with how much solo stuff I’m doing now.

The RPG nook is handled. Most of the built-in shelves are RPG books, and I’ve got a fold-out wire rack for my laptop if I’m doing online play, even though I don’t really like virtual tabletops.

Solving for Kingdom Death

What I really need to solve for is a permanent Kingdom Death setup.

I’ve got a pegboard here I haven’t been able to use because there’s so much junk in front of it. And I’ve got a 4 by 2 and a half foot workbench sitting in the laundry room that I used for 3D printing and don’t use for that anymore. So maybe this becomes the airbrush booth and painting bench, and the 6-foot table slides down in front of the pegboard.

Then I can sort all my Kingdom Death tokens and accoutrements there. I can 3D print deck boxes, hang them on the pegboard, put shelves on it. That pegboard is bolted straight into the concrete foundation, which I don’t know was smart, but that’s how it is, so it’ll hold a ton.

KDM needs the space. The showdown board is 2 by 3 and the hunt board is another 3 feet. Hunt board one way, showdown board the other, and it just barely fits on the 6-foot table. I also need room for the chair, so I’m giving myself a 3-foot buffer around the table. With real measurements instead of eyeballing, the walkway comes out around two and three quarter feet, which is no big deal.

Part of me wants to pop these doors off and hang a shower curtain on a rod instead. It’d be a cool way to enter the RPG den.

Zine Racks and Maps

I felt like this wasn’t being productive, so I went and did other things and came back to it. At first I thought I was wasting my time.

Then I realized what the plan actually bought me. I can put the cubes over here, and then build out zine storage racks for all the A5 books and zines so they display on both sides. Same for my maps. I’ve got framed maps and I don’t want them permanently mounted, and it’s hard to put screws in anything here because most of the walls are concrete.

So, zine racks and map racks on that wall, with some custom lighting built into them. That’ll be a video for the future. But I think this is the final layout, and now it’s time to sell a bunch of stuff and get it out of here so I can actually rearrange.

One Shelf for Works in Progress

That was the easy part. Now the hard part.

The stuff over here is going to long-term storage. Some shelf stuff, Tupperware containers. I spilled coffee on this box a couple of minutes ago and have to clean that up. A bunch of Gunpla I’m probably not getting to soon, though I’ve already done a Gunpla purge and this is what remains, and I want to build all of it. My chaos dwarfs. Confrontation models, legit ones. I want to get better at old-school style painting, so I’ll practice on a couple of things first and do those Sunday.

The rest of this is going to be my works in progress shelf, and I’m going to limit myself to it. No outstanding projects beyond what fits there. I’ll hang a little shower curtain so I can pull it back, grab something to work on, and that’s where everything I plan to work on for the next year lives.

If it doesn’t fit on that shelf or in long-term storage behind me, it’s got to go.

$200 a Day to eBay

So I’m going to try to get $200 worth of stuff onto eBay every day.

Starting with this old Grymkin stuff. Now that I can 3D print it, I don’t need the real metal, and I think the Skin and Moans is resin. It’s kind of rough, so it’ll probably go cheap.

Wow, there are a lot of people selling the Steamforged STLs on eBay. I’m not going to do that. And I want to be clear, unsarcastically, I’m definitely not doing that. I think it’s pretty messed up.

Okay. $200 on eBay, starting to get organized down here, and I still have to get my Warmachine in. Pretty good day. I don’t know if it was a good video, but it was a good hobby day.

See you tomorrow.