Hello everyone! Welcome to my new series where I will be discussing what makes a good hobby space. I am quite lucky in the fact that I have a spare bedroom to use as an office/hobby room but not everyone does. I have seen a lot of articles and threads on where people paint, from the cool garage to the dining room table and the one thing they all have in common is that they work in many ways for the individual.

However, maybe you all moving house soon and will have some dedicated space or maybe you just want to see if you can make your current space more efficient with an upgrade. I am here to show you some handy things that will improve your painting area and storage.

To begin, We will talk about the table/desk/tray or whatever it may be that you rest your models upon.

No matter what you are using as a work surface, it is vital to have lots of room to move around and leg room! Your body does not like been cramped into a position for hours on end and eventually you will start developing back ache and all sorts of pains.

The ideal solution is a desk or table:

I went IKEA crazy when I bought my house. This was because;

1. It is very cheap for what you get and

2. I therefore was not very bothered if it got some paint on it.

My desk is about 4ft long and has ample leg room underneath (although all my gym stuff it currently living there!) I bought the top part of the desk separately from IKEA and this has an awesome magnetic white board (great for army lists) and 3 nice little shelves that are ideal for paint and other materials.

As you can see underneath the desk is lots of room for storage, two handy drawers and a small cupboard.

This is just big enough to fit in my compressor and a few boxes of models that I have yet to paint, plus all my bits.

Some alternatives to this would be one of these: GW paint station or a similar companies version and some storage boxes like these and these. The great thing about the boxes and the paint station is that you can pack it all out of the way and keep in it a box under the bed or on a shelf so the kids can’t reach it etc and it can be quickly accessed when you need to use it again. If you have a garage you can get some really good and not too expensive metal shelving to store boxes on.

The next thing I am going to cover is the desk chair…

I hate uncomfortable chairs. After years of sitting in crappy cheap army plastic chairs I loathe anything without cushion! I found that with a non cushioned chair I had no support for my back and I started to get shoulder pains from my terrible posture. I splashed out on my desk chair (and worked on the posture) and I have not had any pains since.

When I am travelling I use whatever chair I can find and put some pillows on it for support. Most people are very comfortable just using the dining room chairs. Unfortunately my chair is to big to actually fit under my desk (yeah I never hear the end of that!).

Next time I will be covering the  essential tools and where I keep them all. Please let us know what you have in your hobby space and what works best for you!

Until next time!