Near the top of my list of wants for our new home was a space I could dedicate to hobby stuff.  For the past decade, my hobby space was my work space, which made clocking out very difficult.  (It’s why I started doing ‘Workbench Wednesday’ posts: I work from home on most Wednesdays, so I’d turn 90% to the left, take a picture, and then get back to work.) It’s tough to focus on nerd work with work work hanging out in my peripheral vision, so I wanted to segregate the two spaces.

The old space

The new home is perfect, and has accommodated this: there’s a bedroom in the basement just waiting to be used as hobby space.

The space, before.  I’ve got a lot (too much) hobby crap, have someone else’s hobby crap that I’m getting to A Good Home, and the movers just started dumping stuff in there.

Before

So, it was a bit of work over the past month or so to get it shaped up.  Furniture to buy & build, unpacking and organizing to do.

The last, big step this past weekend was painting and lighting the display case.  I’m pretty pumped about that: we got the case from a closing Borders years ago, and I’ve never been satisfied with it.  It’s simply too dark; the lights solve that.  (I’d prefer a less yellow light, and that might come later.  For now, any light in there is a huge improvement.)

It’s not 100% done, of course: at some point I’d like to replace the folding tables with something constructed (which will buy me a little space and, hopefully, give me some place to store terrain) and I’ve got a pile of stuff that needs to go on the walls (posters and there’ll be an I-Love-Me area somewhere). All of that’ll wait, though; the short-term stuff is done.

After

This is the new space:

Space to do airbrushing (which will hopefully help me get some sort of facility with it).  A clock (which was really helpful with working on those Maquisards; every time I’d look up, the time was right in my face… back to work!).  No computer with which to distract myself.  Space for the iPad, if I feel like watching something while I work, but the space is fiddly enough that if I set it up to do that, that’s pretty much all I’m doing with it.

So far, it’s been pretty successful.  If I’m down there, I’m painting. End of story.

(Plus, there’s a catbed in the window for Diesel and two dogbeds for Cricket to bounce between: one beneath the desk and one on the other side of the room.)