Space is a valuable commodity.

Currently, 1 half cupboard (40cm) is completely filled with paint and paint parafanalia, plus 1 shelf of a 80cm cupboard is filled with old GW paints dating back to pre 2000 ones.. Since I will be losing 2 cabinets worth of space when I move I had a small brainwave today while checking a server rack at work. Why not build paint racks in the same way?

Here's why. I paint by the numbers.

No, not like that :)

I've got a small book in which I note down my paint formulas for things that I have painted, so I can just grab the right numbers and repeat what I did the last time. Or one year ago. I hardly ever paint by grabbing paint from the shelf cause the colour looks right. Even when I had them all in front of me, I just don't work that way.

So, server rack? Well, a server rack crams all of the neccesities in the smallest, conveniest (well, mostly) amount of space times as many as need to fit in the widt of the thing. My current paintrack is one from Germany and holds 100 bottles of Vallejo in roughy a 27 deep, 36 wide and 33 tall space (all in cm's). If I put that on my table I lose almost half my table depth. So I put them in the half cabinet. So, how can I manage to halve the needed space and still have the paints (and future paints) that I need? Well, by doing it this way.

1 standard rack, custom made to fit my cabinet, will hold 30 pots of Vallejo. Each level has 11 cm's worth of space so I can get the pots out easily, 3 levels per rack, enough width for 10 pots of paint and a 2cm bar in front of the pots for labelling and holding them in place. I can fit in 11 racks with space left over because the door has a hinge portruding on the inside (Billy cabinet, Ikea). In total that would be 330 pots of paint. I've asked a few friends, who have acces to lasercutters, to draw me up one plus to give me an idea for the costs per rack for 8 normal ones and 2 wider ones to hold my weathering powders and filters (seeing I bought another 7 bottles the other night). If you are still clueless how this will look, think of it as a encycopledia of several books, each book being a rack with paint.

I've discussed this with Kim, explained her why I want this, that I will have the idea examined first, that I will sell off the paints I no longer need  as well as the current paint racks to fund this, and that I have my budget fixed at 50 euros. And she agreed. :)

Now, back to painting.

Edit: Not half bad this. But I thinkl I can do better.