Feel like giving up?

Time for you to step away from the stash and the workbench. Go do something else for a while, tackle a few of the other tasks that need doing. It may take a week or two or even several years but you'll come back. I once took off about eight years...when I came back it was so much better.

I find that cleaning and organizing the stash and workshop helps. If you have too many kits started then you get yourself overwhelmed and that leads to burnout. That is the point I was at when I took my hiatas, I also thought I'd never return so I sold off almost all of my entire stash...several hundred kits...now I kick my self in the butt for doing so. Hindsight is 20/20, had I known that I would get back in with both feet I would have kept them. Some were real gems and collectors must haves.

Get yourself some large boxes...check stores that sell snowthrowers and lawn mowers, those boxes are great for consolidating kits into and protecting while they are packed away in "deep" storage. Inventory each box, attach the list to the outside...(when I sold my stash I sold them in lots...what's in the box is what's included in the lot.) again I recommend holding on to them.

Pack 'em up and stay away until you want to model, forcing oneself doesn't necessarily work, but you got to do what you got to do. The nice thing about my workshop is I can close the door and not see it...it is safe and secure and everything will be right where it was when I left it. Gather your stash into one space. Take a modeling vacation...there are other things to enjoy in life and other tasks that need doing. You'll be back and you'll be in love with the hobby again.

That's why I keep my workshop in the basement.  Keeps it out of site so if I don't feel like modeling it's not there nagging me.

I would recommend keeping the kits and just storing them.  At some point the modeling bug will bite you again and you'll be glad you have them. 

While I dont keep my work table away from where I normally am, I keep it right next to my computer.  Puter gaming is my other hobby, so when I get annoyed with one, I literially spin my chair 45 degrees and im at the other.  It allows me to work when I feel like working.  If im in a game, and loose get all frustrated, I can turn, do alittle detailing on my current project, turn back around, and win.

So listen to these guys.  Dont sell your stuff, just take a break.  

I was in a slump through out most of the late summer and fall. I was just not interested in building or doing anything relating to the hobby. I even stopped looking at some of my normal modeling sites in the last part of the fall....gasp!!!! lol I am gamer and started focusing more on that for a while. Then about a month ago I started looking at garage figure kits, anime kits, and painting miniatures and decided to jump in that. So right now that is what I am working on. Its something new and different for me, refreshing and the main thing its hitting my intest button. At some point I will go back to my aircraft. Remember its just a hobby, do it because you enjoy it. If you aren't enjoying it oir not in the mood for it...wait awhile it might come back. If it doesn't then look for something that gets your interest and you never return to what you were doing then there is alway ebay. lol

We all go through slumps its just part of the course. Do something different then come back to it and see what happens.

rrmmodeler wrote:

I was in a slump through out most of the late summer and fall. I was just not interested in building or doing anything relating to the hobby. I even stopped looking at some of my normal modeling sites in the last part of the fall....gasp!!!! lol I am gamer and started focusing more on that for a while. Then about a month ago I started looking at garage figure kits, anime kits, and painting miniatures and decided to jump in that. So right now that is what I am working on. Its something new and different for me, refreshing and the main thing its hitting my intest button. At some point I will go back to my aircraft. Remember its just a hobby, do it because you enjoy it. If you aren't enjoying it oir not in the mood for it...wait awhile it might come back. If it doesn't then look for something that gets your interest and you never return to what you were doing then there is alway ebay. lol We all go through slumps its just part of the course. Do something different then come back to it and see what happens.

Thats why I dabble in every type of modeling.  Right now on my bench, in whatever stage of progress, is a Starwars kit, a tank, a Bi-plane, and a gundam.  I have figure kits, anime figure kits, more tanks, more planes, more gundams, in my stash.  Whatever I want to build, so I dont get stuck in a tank, or gunpla rut

You're conflicted. You feel guilt for the stash itself and lack of progress against it. You reprimand yourself for your acquisitive nature, buying more and more kits "you'll never finish." You languish because you can't ever seem to get ahead.

Hey, dude, we've all been there. It's okay. The best way to overcome all this?

Admit your'e a collector as much, or more, than a modeler. Your life will become much easier when you do.

C'mon, say it with me: "Im a kit collector. Its okay to be a kit collector.... Im a kit collector. Its okay to be a kit collector..."

Now, doesn't that feel better? Often, the hardest person to tell the truth to is yourself.  :)

Lots of good advice, here, especially Dahut's. I have ±400 kits. Total completed: 3, in the last twenty years. (Trying to schedule more modeling time, but I keep getting involved with horrible kits! Now that's discouraging, especially when the last "OOB" turns out to be a bear!)

I have a friend who had a collection of several thousand, several hundred built. Lost them all in a fire. Guess how many he has now. ~3000, about a hundred built. (Yah, he's fast—and very good!) Will either of us build every one in our stash? Probably not going to live long enough. So what? It feels good just to have them!

Get them organized. Clean  up the work area. Then either:

Pick your favorite kit, and build it OOB. While doing so, don't look at any other kit, anywhere. Build it with what you have on hand or comes in the box. No detailing. No scratchbuilding. No add ons. Maybe even no paint! (I got an old Airfix Hurricane in the Christmas grab bag. I may build it right out of the box, like when I was a kid: Cut it off the sprue, trim it, glue it together. No seam filling, no sanding, no paint. Maybe even a fingerprint or two. Slap decals on it. Fly it around the room making zooming noises…) No doubt you get the general idea: PLAY. Voltaire said: "The greater the intellect, the greater the need for play." You need to remember that this is play, recreation. As we said in the old country: "Comrade, you must have fun! You have no choice!"

Alternatively, put it all up for awhile. But DON'T sell or give away those kits! At last calculation, my stash is worth in excess of $5000. And the value will keep going up, even if I never buy another kit. The value in terms of recreation: incalculable.

Dead right! Listen to Ross, people (a good idea anytime). Tell it brother.......

"Get them organized. Clean up the work area. Then either:

Pick your favorite kit, and build it OOB. While doing so, don't look at any other kit, anywhere. Build it with what you have on hand or comes in the box. No detailing. No scratchbuilding. No add ons... Cut it off the sprue, trim it, glue it together. No seam filling, no sanding, no paint. Maybe even a fingerprint or two. Slap decals on it. Fly it around the room making zooming noises…) in other words, PLAY.

Voltaire said: "The greater the intellect, the greater the need for play." You need to remember that this is play, recreation. As we said in the old country: "Comrade, you must have fun! You have no choice!"

Damn I wish I'd have said that! Keep on, Ross....

"Alternatively, put it all up for awhile. But DON'T sell or give away those kits! At last calculation, my stash is worth in excess of $5000. And the value will keep going up, even if I never buy another kit. The value in terms of recreation: incalculable."

Honestly you will never recover the money you have spent on your models, let alone make a meaningful profit on them. It just aint in the cards. But I can tell you this, you will kick yourself if you get rid of them. I did, once. It has since taken more than a year, to get the stash big enough so the kits will sometimes fall on my head. Oh Sweet Joy! 

"It is better to die a top a pile of plastic kits, than to be saddened in your resolve to be rid of them."

You can quote ME on that one. 

Thanks to you, Ross Martinek, for saying it so well. You ARE the man.

I get in slumps like that too and I have less than 25 kits.

You poor babies with 500 and more kits.

I use my desk as my workspace too, simply because the house I live in is too small to have it anywhere else, so I end up with paint all over my desk, and even some tan on the lower part of my keyboard where I had oversprayed with my airbrush

Part of the problem is indeed where to KEEP them all.  Oh, and of course where to display them once they're built.  The closet in my bedroom is literally packed full, both on the shelf and in the floor all the way up to the shelf, so a space of I think 2x2x15 packed to the brim, then I have a tower at the end of my desk that's also 2x2 but only about 7 ft high, then I have some on the desk, over by the TV, in the spare room closet, in the livin room tucked away.. so I literally can't go anywhere except the bathroom withint staring at a bunch of kits in boxes.    I think I do feel guilt over having so many, and in a way even how I got them all.  See, back like a year or two ago now, I was dating this girl and she HATED models, thought they were a waste of money and space, just "fancy toys", and we were trying to save money for a place so I sold all but my favorite 10 or so kits,  and then just short of 8 months ago she left me for someone else, I guess she was tired of waiting to move out of her parents house and I ended up picking the hobby up to distract me from the hurt, especially since I didn't have a steady job at the time to help with that.  In those 8 months I've built around 20 models, and built my collection up from the few I had left to the 500+ I have now (yeah I went nuts and spent everything prety much I had saved on models, lots of paint, and an xbox360 lol)

I do take time to do other things, lately I've been wrapped up playing Saints Row 2, and started collecting Manga again, and actually reading them as I get them.  I think part of it though, in addition to constantly seeing all these models is I keep seeming to mess somthing up lately.  The last two things I've tried to build got messed up.  One was a Harley, I glued the hand grips on the wrong side, so they were upside down and it was very noticable, and I use the quick drying glue so I couldnt' get them both off, only one.  And the other was a Yamaha Roadstar (similar style), and I dropped one of the long screws that holds the wheels on and well I can't find it no matter how hard I look.  

I do have a variety, while I do have more cars than anything, I still have lots of aircraft, a few tanks, even a boat (which scares me.. the USS Constition.. a friend gave it to me years ago).  I couldn't even begin to say how much I spent on all these kits, because honestly I havn't kept track, but probably more than $10,000, ranging from a few I got for 99 cents (even a couple I got free cuz of a really nice seller on ebay), all the way up to around $100 for the PL Enterprise NX-01 1/350 scale.  

I really do wish I had somewhere to put them other than in here though.  I wouldn't dare put them in the storage building we have now, unless I had a nice big steel container cuz it leaks, is so flimsy (plywood and a few beams) and just yeah, I wouldn't trust it with kits.  

Triarius - I've never been one of those people who super details stuff, mostly because I'm just terrible at it.  If some detail can be painted on, I can ussually do it unless its really small, but other than the damage/dirt detail I did to one dirt track racer I built, most things I build are OOB.  I tried doing wiring once on a car engine, bought the wires and everything, but I just couldn't get even ONE to stay in place so I gave that idea up for now haha

See how therapeutic this is?

Your story is not unique. More women have come between a man and his pastimes than I care to count.

Im eager to hear more. 

Lofweir wrote:

That's why I keep my workshop in the basement.  Keeps it out of site so if I don't feel like modeling it's not there nagging me.

I tried this with my wife, but it didn't work.

Seriously, though, if I had a number of kits that I could never get to, I would aski myself: Why do I have these?

It's got to boil down to a) you really want to build them or b) you collect them to have or c) You collect them to eventually sell and make money.

If you are going to build, as others have said, pick one and "just do it".

If you find you have too many and want to get rid of some, determine the keepers and then do the research to see if what you have left if worth putting up for sale or not.

Just my 2 cents.

Yeah I just don't understand women, not many guys do, most seem to want us to give a lot of stuff up for them, but they're not willing to do the same. 

As for getting rid of some, that's part of the problem.  I combed through my list one time, thinking I'd knock some out that I had just gotten in a lot or somthing, and searched around on eBay to see how they would sell and most of them aren't even worth trying to sell, other than the ones I really want (like the old 70's Ford Off-Road Van and a lot of the starships and a few random other cars) and I'm not about to part with them.  When I started I did buy just ones I wanted to build, but as time went on I started getting somthing that I might build, but even if I don't I just wanna say I have them

The odd thing is.. I think I'm not the weird person anymore, at least not here XD  It seems a lot of the people here either have a ton of models they've not built, a mate of some type that nags them about it, or in a slump.

They're a whole heck of a lot easier to store now than when they're built, at which point they go into a steady decline. Take it slowly, get them out and stroke styrene now and then, but for gosh sakes don't put pressure on yourself.

Selling them is drastic- you'll probably regret it, and as you have seen, will cost you money.

I didn't realize either until I started hanging around here, that most people have a stash, usually bigger than mine- 30 or 40.

The Stash has a life of it's own. It must be appeased and catered to.

All women must know this, or be taught.

Hans von Hammer wrote:

I been married 4 times... I've been a modeler once... Any questions?

awesome quote.

I did for a while, tried getting back into it with my scratch-build, and now I'm down for the winter. 

What I need to do is find some figurines for the scale.  I found the right size figurines would be the 5-1/2" GI Joe.

Nope, never, and my wife loves me and my hobby.  One in a million.

Doug

uglygoat wrote:

Hans von Hammer wrote: I been married 4 times... I've been a modeler once... Any questions? awesome quote.

You're kidding, right? Quotes like that shut off all further conversation - its the same as saying: "Nuff said."

What it means is: "Mine is the last word. No others need be said, now."

You're kidding, right? Quotes like that shut off all further conversation - its the same as saying: "Nuff said." What it means is: "Mine is the last word. No others need be said, now."

Nope... What it means is exactly what I typed, pard...   It doesn't require translation, interpretation, or context... It's just a plain ol' fact...

However, since you deem it of some importance to translate it, it means, "I don't give a sh*t if a woman I'm in a relationship with wants me to quit modeling ... I can (and will) get another girl if need be..."    

'Nuff said...

Why be in a relationship with someone who isn´t happy seeing you be happy?

                                                   Mac

"Nope... What it means is exactly what I typed, pard...   It doesn't require translation, interpretation, or context... It's just a plain ol' fact...

However, since you deem it of some importance to translate it, it means, "I don't give a sh*t if a woman I'm in a relationship with wants me to quit modeling ... I can (and will) get another girl if need be..."    

'Nuff said..."

Thanks for the comments - bro. You pretty soundly confirmed my earlier comments. 

Again, thanks.