Solving the money, space, time conundrum

When I tried this blogging lark before, I wrote a piece about three principle factors that impact hobbies - money, space and time.   

Six years on and I think that this piece is more relevant than ever so I thought I'd do an update on how these factors have changed for me in the intervening years.

Money is such a hot topic at the moment which everything seeming to get more expensive by the week.  I've been lucky (ie. worked hard and been careful) and have disposable income.  However, as I wrote back in April this year hobby costs have risen and this has modified my purchasing.  So the financial impact on the way I approach the hobby has increased.

Space has always been an issue and as I've kept adding to my collection and become interested in yet morenew periods, there's been even more of a squeeze (literally) on the space I have available.  I've had to make a conscious effort to limit my book buying over the last year with bookshelves groaning under the weight.  Most rulebooks I now buy in PDF format and only print those I'll game with.  Part of my plan for the last part of the year is to look at improving the storage of all my hobby stuff.  The space issue is therefore also exerting a change on the way I approach the hobby.

What about time?  Here we have seen an improvement.  Back in 2016 I was spending a minimum of 16 hours a week commuting.  Although this improved with an extra day at home, I was still spending around 4 hours a day commuting.  And then we had Covid which was the game changer.  A lot of those projects that had been sitting there got done.  On returning to work I've had a change in location reducing the commute and also another drop in days, being only required to go in twice a week.  That's increased my hobby time which has been great so I can't complain on this aspect.

So what can I do to balance the other two factors?  Something that helps on both the financial and space fronts is to look at smaller scales for new projects.  At the moment I'm very interested in 10mm.  I have a few hundred Punic Wars figures in this scale and while I've been sorting these out, I've begun to really appreciate them.  10mm offers a satisfying compromise of an enjoyable painting experience (figures still have detail), is affordable and easier to store. 

So there we have it, I'll no doubt ramble on more about this at some stage down the tracks. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

City ruins scatter terrain

Image
2024 and 2025 will see the 80th anniversary of many of the great city battles of the Second World War, such as Warsaw, Budapest, Königsberg and Berlin to name but a few.  With this is mind I've been looking at my terrain collection.  My city terrain is centred around some marvellous 20mm MDF buildings I got from Commission Figurines at Salute back in 2014.  I built some rubble piles a few years ago, but when I got it all out of the loft it didn't look very impressive so I decided to make some more. The first job was to sort the base materials.  I used four different materials: cork board; 5mm foam board; old plywood bases and old credit cards.  The cork board and foam board are great materials for this type of terrain proving height, being relatively strong, easy to cut and very lightweight.  I started by pulling apart pieces of cork board to the rough sizes I wanted and then set about the pieces with a Stanley knife and an old screwdriver.  It's very easy to carve irregul
Read more

28mm Victrix Late-Roman Archers and Slingers

Image
When I first embarked on my Late-Roman project a year or so ago, I bought a few sample sprues from Gripping Beast, Wargames Atlantic and Victrix.  The Victrix one was from the Late Roman Archers and Slingers set.  The quality of these convinced me to choose Victrix for the project and I duly ordered up some sets.  After working my way slowly through these I finally went back to this original frame.  These are absolutely lovely models.  There's loads of variety and they go together beautifully.  The instruction sheet which I got from the Victrix website makes a massive difference in this regard.  I really enjoyed working on these.  They were quick to assemble and quick to paint up being in a uniform of sorts.   I only have the one frame, but I took a couple of the bodies from some of the Dark Age Archers that I was working on at the same time ( here ) and added some spare arms to make another pair of staff slingers.  This worked pretty well adding variety to the poses.  I'll do
Read more

More 28mm Dark Age warriors

Image
As a bit of a palette cleanser while working my way through the 15mm Landsknechts, I started on a half dozen Victrix Dark Age Archers.   I'd completed a  first batch of these in January and it was good to get back to them.  The original intention was to use these as Norse warriors for my Ragnarok project.  Since then though I've been looking at making them more useable for a longer period of history.  Therefore, with the exception of the sword armed warrior who is very Viking, I've tried to make them quite generic.  As before nearly all the parts came from the Victrix Dark Age Archers set, with a few extras from the Victrix Viking sprue.  These were used to make the sword and seax armed figures.  There was the usual amputations and other bits of minor surgery to make things fit and that's all part of the fun with these plastic figures.  I followed the same process as before and methodically took notes of what parts I used for each figure.  This helped to make sure that
Read more