I’m a mess. I clean it up before I start a new kit. All the tools and paints put away neatly. I used large pieces of cardboard on my work surface. Those get pulled or turned over. Everything wiped down. Looks like a super clean work area.
By the time I’m done with a kit, it’s a complete mess. paint, glue, little unused pieces everywhere. My Wife says she doesn’t understand how I find anything and that she couldn’t work like that… LOL
I tend to do a complete cleanup after finishing each build. It’s almost a ritual for me to get everything cleaned up and start the next project with a fresh workspace.
While I’m building, though, it’s a different story! There’s usually plenty of clutter, masking tape, paper towels, and tools scattered around. I wouldn’t necessarily call it tidy, but I do try to keep it clean.
I also have a few tools that help keep the mess under control. One of my favorites is a nail dust collector, the kind used in beauty salons when filing fingernails. Whenever I’m sanding or scraping plastic, I work directly over it, and the little vacuum pulls the dust into a filter. It works remarkably well!
Well, for me, it’s pretty simple. My ‘workbench’, as it stands, is a 14" x 19 3/4" ‘discarded’ plastic cutting board. Additionally, my other ‘surface’ is an old Navy single bed white (or at least it used to be) top sheet (and when I say ‘old Navy’ I mean an old sheet from the Navy, not Old Navy store) that I’ve had since I was about 14. I’m 66 today and I still have it. This used to be what I worked on. It has paint, varnish, glue staining, X-acto knife cuts and is still going strong. Depending on the task at hand, it will either sit below or above the cutting board.
My paints (except the new ones I recently purchased, which are all still in their boxes unused) all fit inside a plastic container of about 5" x 8" x 3" and are a plethora of old (and I mean OLD) Testors, Pactra and Tamiya paints with all my old brushes sitting on top of all that.
Clean up has been and will continue to be a regular occurrence of, when I finish a phase of effort that requires me to ‘be finised for now’ I take all my parts from my build and place them in either the kit’s purchase box or some box dedicated to the task, place any parts that are ‘curing’ for any reason and safely set them aside. I’d (and will) take the sheet to the trash can and shake it out, then pick out any bits that didn’t come off, fold it up in a ‘right sized’ mat style and place all my stuff on top of that.
It’s been how I’ve been doing it since I was 14 and I think that the same practices will keep me in that same mode of ‘clean as you go.’ I’ve worked on the kitchen table, on the floor, a desk and just lately, while sitting on the couch (with the cutting board on my lap).
I’m just not desirous of a ‘fancy’ spot for my efforts. Good light? Check (I have found an old swing arm lamp with both a light bulb [now LED] and a flourescent ring [which I have to find a higher wattage for better coverage] that provides very good overhead, in front, from behind capability). A place to store my stuff? Check as noted above. All my stuff fits in their respective boxes/containers and in or on they go at the end of each session.
Some day, who knows? Maybe I’ll have an actual desk space that is sacrosanct for just my modeling, but so far, that looks to be a very far off ‘someday.’
Keeping it cleaned up and neat when not in use required me to keep it clean as I go along, so that part has been a habit stretching back 52 years.
Ultimately, it’s all about developing a set of practices that become second nature – aka: habits, such that at no time do you get to tell yourself, “I’ll do that later.”
I honestly don’t know how you do it! I have two six-foot desks arranged in an L, plus a separate rolling workstation for whatever model I’m currently building, and I still find myself wishing I had more space! 
I’m genuinely impressed that you’ve managed to make such a portable setup work so well for so many years.
Here’s what my workspace looks like, and I still manage to run out of room!
Hmmm… over all my 77 years I have been hopelessly disorganized so am not one to proffer cogent advice, you will have to accept the following. My solution is to forge ahead until I can’t stand it any more - then I take an hour or so, clean up everything, during which I invariably devise another brilliant organizational plan that won’t work except to cost me wasted time looking for were I stored bits and pieces under the rules of the new plan. I keep a hand held vac. to capture debris, a great idea unless I forget to plug it in. Sometimes my long suffering wife will get frustrated and attempt to apply her very good organizational skills to the task - it never works. So, my first real thought for you and one I should remember is a maxim that’s carved on a Delphic temple, “Know thyself.” (Those Greek philosophers could be quite succinct). The second is from “The Bard”, Hamlet when Polonius says to Laertes, “This above all - to thine own self be true … .” He wasn’t exactly talking about the character of the owner of a messy desk, but the sentiment can still be bent to fit. The final thought comes from Einstein who observed, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?” Einstein did not have an organized desk. Hope that helps, obviously it never helped me, but one lives in hope.
When the mess and clutter get too much, I stop and clear the desk, putting everything away, then starting up again.
