Miniature storage solutions

Nothing painted since my last post, sadly - my painting desk is still covered in half-unpacked stuff, and with my wife working most hours that I'm not currently it's not left much time for hobby stuff...

I have, however, made some strides in sorting out my storage for painted miniatures - the sweet basement in our new place came with some built in shelves that I thought would be ideal for storing painted miniatures - my original idea was to magnetise the bases of all my miniatures (cue ordering some tiny magnets from Hong Kngnthat too an age to arrive) and use metal trays, so that whenever I needed miniatures for a game I could just grab the relevant tray and be ready to go, but then I thought about the possibility of getting some stackable boxes to really maximise the space, and soon found myself grabbing some Really Useful Boxes:

Three for a tenner for the 4L model from our local Rymans, which looked it would fit most miniatures quite comfortably (pikes notwithstanding).

So, I started digging out my painted zombies and survivors to see how many miniatures I could fit into each box, and barring the occasional lost limb that a quick dab of superglue was able to fix, found only one casualty of the move:

He bent back into shape carefully, with only minor chipping (and as he's a zombie, a little splash of blood is probably the easiest way to cover it up!)

And so, that's how many zombies you can fit into a Really Useful Box!

And lo, maximum space was used! Handily, I think I should be able to adjust the position of the shelves, as they look like they're on adjustable metal bits, so I should be able to raise the shelf they're currently on so that I can fit three stacked boxes on the shelf below.

A day has passed since I wrote most of this post, and so in the meantime I've had a rearrange of some shelves and bought some more boxes:

Mmm, efficient. Well, more efficient than the previous shelving:

which was a frankensteined monster of several drawer units spliced together, with a mix of finished, half finished, and bare metal miniatures in it. Once everything else is sorted, it's just going to be pure supplies...

Now comes the fun but - digging through my miniatures:

(Currently quite a mish mash, I'll sort them more when I get some more boxes!)

Back to the Really Useful Boxes though, I'll probably still look into magnetising the miniature bases and the bottom of the boxes, for ease of transport - I had a nose in a few shops around town after work, but couldn't seem to find any sort of magnetic tape or sheet - has anyone had any success with something like this?

Moving right along...

I've been quiet for a while, but I'm still here! Just not getting any painting done at the moment, what with my new job and moving house!

We've moved 0.2 miles down the road, to a little house of our own, with one crucial feature - a sweet basement for me to turn into a gaming room!

Initially it looked like this:

And then in the midst of rearranging it looked like this:

But, having snuck back out all the things that my wife suggested we store in the basement and building some bookcases:

It looks like this:

(Painting desk starting to be visible amidst the piles of half-sorted oddments!)

Not done yet, but well on the way.

Several of my favourite features include handing ledges on the underside of the stairs on the way down, giving somewhere to display a number of nerdy collectables:

Built in shelving, that will hopefully one day be used to store and display trays of painted miniatures, for easy access whilst gaming:

And a sweet alcove for board games:

(Although I've since stripped out the family games to go live in the dining room, as I found another box of my games after taking this picture...)

Another benefit of moving house and buying lots of furniture (we own a dining table now, like real adults) is that I now have a metric ton of interestingly shaped bits of polystyrene and enough corrugated card to make several tiny model shanty towns:

As I unpack some more things, I'll probably have some more things to offer up for trade or sale, which I'll add to the previously used page to give first refusal to the good people of the circles of the internet that I frequent before I toss them to eBay...

Once I've finished the last few bits of unpacking down there, I'll need to sort out getting a gaming table. There were a couple of desks next to a skip over the road at the weekend (where one of the local universities seems to be clearing out one of their facilities) that I considered dragging home to see if I could lash them together to make the base of a table, but it had rained, and I'm probably going to need a table that can be folded own rather than several hefty chunks of pine, so I passed... Every YouTube video on the subject seems to involve carpentry to build a table from scratch - any advice, oh lovely people reading this?