I recently fixed up a small service room in the house as my shop. It’s very small, barely nine by ten feet but it’s mine!!! I built some shelving from PVC water pipe and wood. All of my kits are now organized as well as my tools but my paints are a mess! I lose a lot of time looking for a color, if I can find it at all.
I’m looking for ideas for paint stands, where I could organize them all and clearly see the colors. I mostly have Tamiya acrylics (60-80), Vallejo dropper bottles (60) and a bunch of Model Master bottles (50-60). Can any of you offer a tight space solution?
This was my solution. I built this stand out of strips of 1/2" Sintra, an expanded PVC foam sheet material used in sign making. It is tiered like a staircase, and I sized the “treads & risers” to fit the Tamiya 10ml bottle exactly. The number and color are visible just above the lid of the bottle below. It’s split into two sections: Gloss on the left and Flat on the right.
This image was taken just after one of my semi-annual cleanups, trust me, it is rarely that clean!
My Tamiya/Gunze/Alclad paint rack is made out of some crappy old shelves my wife bought back in college, supported by PVC cylinders and soft drink cans. And it’s amazingly stable!
Model Master goes in that red thing with the drawers to the right, and the Vallejo’s in the yellow bins on the shelf atop the “build” side of my desk.
Heaven knows I have tried, but the bottles are both not equal shape, and then you have to store duplicates somewhere.
My current solution, is to store them in drawer cabinets, the sort of thing you get normally meant to hold household ‘stuff’ normally bought in the hardware/housewares section of department stores made of plastic with big generous drawers of varying sizes small to biggest at the bottom.
My collection currently sits in 2 drawers that are about 13" wide and 15" deep and with a depth of about 3" it’s holding several years worth of Tamiya, Model Master, Humbrols, Floquil, and Gunze Sanya with a good dose of old school Testors custom mixes for clothingshades.
They are handy to have nearby, but at the end of a day’s work they are not underfoot or eating usefulwall or shelf or desk space. That’s the key for me, at the end of the day, I want them out of my hair. Simple matter to pull an entire drawer out if I feel like it.
I use the lower two much thicker drawers to store models n stuff that are in zip lock bags etc. Its on wheels so I can always move it easily. Makes an ideal mobile base too.
I grabbed a few “Lazy Susan”-type spice racks at several garage sales for .50-.75 cents each…
The most-frequently-used colors I keep on the one on my bench, the rest are on a shelf above it… Un-opened ones are in a plastic 3-drawer-set that I found in a vacated apartment…
Rattle-cans are stored on a 1x4 that I got screwed to the wall, with a piece of quater-round trim running the length of it for a lip…
Total cost- About the price of two rattle-cans of Model Master…
I ended up buying the three plastic chests, the kind with four plastic drawers and putting all my paints in there. Not an ideal solution for me but at least much more organized and easier to find a color I want.
I’d prefer to have them all in some type of bookshelf type arrangement but being such a small room, I just don’t have the necessary space. Anyway, it’s done… for now.
Yeah, that’s the problem with my paint stairs. It’s deep! I don’t mind as the space it occupies was “dead” space that was hard to reach. But in a tight spot, there are better solutions!
Here is what I have built. Used basswood sourced from my LHS. The small shelves on the left were found at a yard sale. New unopened bottles go behind the almost empty bottle.
My paint storage shelves made with inexpensive 1x2 construction:
