As regular readers of this blog know, we have moved house recently. While the general details of the move and the new house are out of scope here, one room is firmly within the realm of subjects covered in these pages: the wargame room.
As all of you who have ever moved house know, unless you are very rich are have the luxury of spreading the move over a large period of time, the place you move to ends up as a tangled mess of boxes, disassembled furniture and lost socks. The wargame room (one of the smaller bedrooms in the house became the wargame room, after a number of different planning iterations) was no different in respect. This is what it looked like just after the move:
Comments overheard from the various people helping us out with the move suggested that I’d never be able to put all of that stuff away and still have room left to fit in a table. As a veteran of several moves (depending on what you consider a move, 5 or 7 moves before this — hopefully — final one), I know with what efficiency you can store stuff, and I also knew I could store less used things under the table. So I wasn’t worried in that regard.
Well, it turns out that I only just have enough room to fit all of my stuff in, but I managed to cram in the lot:
On these pics, you can see the wargame table itself (lots of infrequently used things are bulging out from underneath it — I plan to replace this trestle and board table with one whose supports are shelving units), my painting area with terrain storage above it and a book case of wargame and history books. The entire wall behind it is overflowing with boxes containing the often used things, so perhaps I’ll have to add some more shelving.
Nevertheless, the room and table have been used in anger twice already (as reported here as well), and I’m quite happy with it.
I do have the same problem. Too much stuff, things get piled on top of each other, and after a while, you don’t want to set up cool tables anymore because it is too much work to shuffle things around ;-).
Providing storage space underneath the table is definitely a must, since painted figures take up much more space than unpainted ones.
But, after all, let’s praise ourselves we do have wargaming rooms available!
Congratulations. The best under table storage I have seen is Stefan’s- Converted Kitchen Units bolted back to back. They have the advantage of being the right height to play on when standing up, giving an eyelevel view when sitting down, and the doors prevent things getting damaged during the victory dance when someone finally manages to brew-up a Tiger with a baked bean can and a sack of spuds. Cheers Graham