Organizing the Grey Tide

I've been in a hobby rut of late. In part this is because of a busy schedule, and in part it could be some lingering burnout. For me, if I just let something alone, a week away from the table will become two, which will become a month, and so on. I prefer to keep myself involved, keep the hobby on my mind, and maybe identify something I can do with my hobby I am motivated about. For me right now, that's organizing all my stuff. 

The Grey Tide

I've mentioned having a grey tide, as you can see in the back of the picture above, I also have a tide of sprues, which take up a lot of space, particularly the sprues that are mostly empty, but with some good bits left. I'd never really had a good place to put these bits before; a bitz box is great, but for someone as ADD as myself with the hobby, it quickly can become an unusable mess when you have bits from several armies across several systems. 

Feeling motivated to improve my organization (or lack thereof), I went out and purchase a couple plastic toolboxes. These are pretty light-weight, cheap, and can be wall mounted if/when I get myself a dedicated hobby nook. 

I purchased these at Lowes, and they came in two different styles, as you can see. I bought two of the kind with the small and large trays. The trays are deep enough to hold completed minis as well as bits. 

One bin holds my entire Mercs force, dice, and cards

I honestly really like the smaller trays, so will be hunting for more of those, and am intrigued by this one on Amazon. It's a little bit more expensive than the ones I got, but also has quite a few more drawers. I'm also interested in the dividers to break up the larger containers, as each box has a couple slots to divide the contents. 

 As you can see in the pic above, I've been using several bins for each unit type. In that picture, I have one large bin for the Hellion boards, another for their weapons (and arms), another for Legs and Torsos, and two more Dark Eldar-wide bins with all the Dark Eldar heads and accessory bits from the various sprues. I did something similar with my Tyranids, giving the bodies and heads of termagants one bin, while each of their weapon options were separate small bins on their own. For things that clearly have two halves, like Termagant heads, I kept a bit of sprue to connect the two parts.

Bits to make ~20 termagants

The whole process definitely removed a good bit of wasted space, and made things more accessible. In the three bins I purchased, I fit just about all the bits for my Dark Eldar, Eldar, Tyranids and Orks, along with my very small Mercs and Warmachine collections, and three bins for Battlefleet Gothic.

All that with room to spare - the pulled out drawers are enough to fit possible a whole other army of bits.

Pile of boxes and sprues I can clear from my hobby hoard

As I started on my Orks, I got the hobby bug back a bit and went ahead and assembled the three Killa Kans I had on the sprue rather than clip them and later try to figure out what odd bit goes where. Additionally, for me at least, having the bits organized and already removed from the sprue makes the prospect of assembling a unit or few models here and there far less daunting.

What do you do to keep your "to-do" list organized or stored?