House move – hobby move

Right now, I have two display cabinets full of my more recent projects, plus my older models that are difficult to store. Pre-Covid I used a lot of shelf space in the living room for hobby stuff (during lockdown I moved upstairs to work so my partner started using the desk space). I also have lots of armies in boxes in our bedroom, and my new hobby space in the bedroom.

Lets not forget the boxes of stuff in the loft, which I’ve lost track of and I’m in no position to get a photo of them yet.

Most of my stuff is already boxed up for storage, so moving it will be relatively easy.

The biggest piece of prep work required is boxing up my models from the display cabinet. I used a large makeup brush to dust all the models as I packed them, and put them in re-used food delivery boxes with copious amounts of bubble-wrap. My new house is only a 10 minute drive away so I’m not too concerned about excessive damage in transit. I only broke one model while packing them up (the lance off a GW Mortis Engine).

The box bedroom is my office and I will be using it for my assembly and painting space. I’ve now got all my bits boxes, paints, brushes etc. on my office shelves. Before they were split between my office space and the shelves in the living room.

Most of the rest of my stuff is still piled in the spare room. Its bottom priority for building furniture so I imagine it will be there for a while. There’s also some stuff in the garage but I can’t get to it to take a photo. It’s in serious need of a sort out.

Now my two display cabinets have moved from the living room to having one in my office and one in my gaming room. The office one I’ll use to display my one-off painted minis, while the one in my game room will be for gaming pieces – currently Kingdom Death.

Most of the recent models you can find in my old projects, but I also have models here I painted up to a decade ago. Back in the late 2000’s and early 2010’s I had an e-bay problem where I wanted to collect every old GW undead model, plus a selection of other models.

At the weekend I was sorting through my old RPG and army books when I found two old biscuit tins. Within I found these old models which I had forgotten about.

They’ve now been rescued and put on display. I painted them about a decade ago but I’m still happy with how they turned out.

The Cygnar were done just as Warmachine 2nd Edition was coming out. I only recall playing a couple of games. If you’re interested in the lightning effect I covered it in my first ever project here: https://www.beastsofwar.com/project/1223048/

The Orks were for Diganob which our gaming club showed some interest in a while ago. I think again I managed to only play a game or two. A basic colour scheme brought together with simple weathering and mud effects.

The next task on my move list was to clear out the old books I’ve accumulated over the years. Back in university I played DnD 3rd edition and I probably bought every single rulebook, not to mention many 3rd party rulebooks. Even at the time many were simply read once and never used.

I also liked to buy every single Warhammer Army Book and every 40k Codex.

I also had a small collection of novels – mostly Horus Heresy.

I used to tell myself I might read them again or look at the artwork. But as nearly all of them sat in the loft of my last house for a decade, I know now that’s not going to happen.

First I selected a few books that I definitely wanted to keep. These were mostly the dedicated artwork books which I might feasibly peruse at some point.

The I downloaded the “We Buy Any Book” app. I could then use the phone to scan each book barcode and within a second it would tell me how much I could get for it if I sold it. Some books weren’t recognised or had no value, but many were worth something. I found there was not rhyme or reason to the value. Some Warhammer Army books were worth several pounds and some were worthless. It had nothing to do with age or how popular the army was at the time they were is use, as far as I can recall.

Once I’d gone through my entire collection and put those with a value into re-used house move boxes, about 2’3rds of my books were ready to be sold. I had to redistribute the books a bit as only when I went to book collection did the app tell me that no box could be over 12 or 15kg (I forget the exact limit).

I could either drop the boxes off at a collection point or have a courier collect them. The shipping was free. I went for the collection option as I had 11 boxes weighing 12kg each.

I printed off the labels and stuck them to the boxes and a few days later the courier collected them.

Collection was on 9th September and the parcels were finally fully processed and I got paid on 28th September, so it too just under three weeks. No idea if that’s their normal lead time or it took a bit longer because there were a lot of boxes.

In short I sold about 243 books and got £593.68 for them (average £2.44 per book) and it took me a few hours to do all the processing. All it cost me were 11 shipping boxes.

Times being what they are I thought some people might find this information useful.

Below is a screenshot of some typical Games Workshop book resale prices.

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