My Hobby Area

 Over Spring Break my son and I spent a good bit of time cleaning up my "Man Cave" both to make some room for him and his projects (which includes a 3D printer) and to appease my wife who has become concerned that our house is being transformed on an accelerating basis from a standard home to a storage facility for miniatures and their related debris.  Personally, I didn't see anything wrong with that but I'm not the one who calls the shots on these things....

2 years ago I did splurge a bit and purchased a commercial workbench from American Workbench (their Ben Franklin model) to use as my painting station.  Having a fixed "work" location is very useful and when cleaned up looks very presentable and serves as a great staging location for game nights.

 My game room is dominated by the table, which was built by yours truly and has served me well over the years.  It's a bit beat up for its days as a robotics workbench when my son was in high school but she's still in good working order.  There is a built pair of book shelves which are usually in disarray.  The table top is 4' x 8'.

Currently the wood is unfinished furniture grade pine and my wife would like me to dress it up a bit - perhaps add some decorative framing and cherry stain.  I think that will be an early fall project.

 There's a good bit of storage under the table which is accessed via sliding doors on either side.  Most of the storage is used to hide the lead and plastic mountains from prying eyes....

One thing that needs to be addressed is that there is no rails to hold dice, drinks and reinforcements  along the sides.  I've got a project in the workshop to build some "L" shaped trays the will attach along the sides.  Each tray will be 4 feet long and when attached will form a shelf.  They'll also be able to be flipped over to provide a playing area extension so the total playing surface can be expanded to a 5' x 9' space

 I did build a mini cabinet inside the workbench for miniature trays.  This unit has enough space to hold 2,000 28mm infantry figures (mounted on 20mm square bases.  It's currently filled with a range of stuff including my 15mm Flames of War collections.

My wife allowed my one set of storage cabinets, which I find very useful.  Sadly, they are pretty much filed to the brim and additional storage units are forbidden by executive management.  At some point I'll need to sell some of my stuff to make room for other stuff.  Most likely to go first will be my Romans and Dacian collections which occupy the bottom shelves of the middle two units.  They haven't seen the playing table since the last time I ran a Hail Caesar game at Historicon - which was in 2012!

In terms of future game room projects, In addition to the trays described above, my other "big" gaming project will be to finish a set of sectional terrain units - I started that project last summer and will need to complete it by July'15 in order to put on my planned games at Historicon.

 To be honest, I think both the game room and  table were happier when they were used as a robotics building platform.  All of the boy scouts in this picture are off in college now studying to be some type of engineer from left to right - Virginia Tech (Mining), Carnegie Mellon (Robotics) and GA Tech (Mechanical).  All three got scholarship offers so there was some good from their robotics addiction.

The robotics field has been replaced by a nice card table and the storage cabinets for miniatures - again a bit quieter and less damage prone but not nearly as fun!