Managing games & relationships

[Lex]

A short introduction to managing a wife/family in combination with your miniature modeling/gaming addiction.

• make sure your hobby stays contained in a corner of the premisses that can be barred from public viewing (this avoids visiting friends, neighbours and relatives of your wife to ask embarrising questions)
• make sure that IF you do NEED to use the kitchen/diningroom table, that there is ALWAYS some protective material to avoid your paintspills. And it is highly recommended NOT to use the tablelinnen for that purpose
• when you have mutual friends visiting the subject of your conversations should steer clear from any hobby related subjects. This is even more true when your better half is the ONLY one not participating in them
• small children and smaller toy soldiers dont mix together well, as toy soldiers mind end up in nexpected places. This also is true for pets.
• it is OK for your partner to call your expertly painted army "his toy soldiers", or "those little men"

I am sure there is plenty more that you all can cook up, so feel free...   I might even split it up into a seperate thread.....

But seriously what DOES work for me, and has for the last 20 odd years, is to agree on a "gaming allowance", which is a certain amount of time and money that can go towards my hobbies (the money part is the "traceable" cashflow, obviously you all now how to handle slushfunds).
For me this means that yearly events like the EuroGT are prety much planable up ahead, and this also allowed me to make my US/Canada trip a couple of years back, by carrying over some time from the year before. Remember, most spouses are used to working with budgets, so sit down with them, and give them some reasonable numbers to work with, and you might find yourself able to do more gaming than you can ever manage to get in on the sly !!

[Hena]

I'll respond to Lex above and wish that this is separated out as it's not about the original thread.

Couple of points that I've learned with wife and small kids (0 - 5 years).

• Get yourself a self contained painting desk. What I mean is that a system which you can close drawers so that when not painting, a single model or any thing else won't be seen. This really helps with getting a corner for your modelling.
• The above applies to your painted minis as well. Get a good system on how you can store your miniatures. I have trays in which I use to transport them and they fit just right into a small cabinet that's below shelves in our living room.  So I dedicated trays for armies also that way it's easy to get minis out if you go out to play as well.
• Keep any paints and glues in place where kids can't physically reach. I once came home to find that my 2 year old had managed to get into my painting desk. Let's just say that pink wasn't the colour I had in mind for tyranids and tzeentch LatD epic armies . Nor was my wife happy with kid + super glue combination (luckily though only in fingers).

[Stomm]

On the last points, I'm actually fortunate enough to have a four bedroom house, and our two girls insist on sleeping in the same room. This was started out of necessity as we had leaks in the top floor bedrooms. But as soon as we tried to move the little one out into a room of her own, her older sister objected in a most vocal manner, and does so every time that she wakes up alone, usually because the little one has had a rough night with a cold or something. Currently they're three and two years old BTW, only fourteen months apart in age...



Anyway, the upshot is that we've got a spare bedroom with a double bed in it, this was supposed to be one of the girl's rooms, and we've got a 2nd spare bedroom that has a fouton in it, and a great big desk and lots of shelves, most of which are filled with my books, figure cases and various boxed sets...

The only downside of this is that when I do get down to some painting, my wife then complains that I 'disapear upstairs', which is true to an extent. But we don't currently have ant coffee tables large enough downstairs and I don't fancy spending half an hour of my painting time moving all my stuff downstairs, etc...

[pw]

It sounds like we're all (a) quite old boys and (b) that we all have similar strategies.

My position sounds close to Stomm's inthat we've got too many rooms at home to the extent that I've got my own playroom in which to hide my stuff from both my wife and my son (he's 2). The key for me has always been keeping things hidden away (for some reason they actually seem to quite irritate my wife). To this end I have to keep things tidy (mostly in Kaiser Rushforth cases on shelves) and I tend to paint once she's gone to bed. Playing games is another matter. We both get one night off from house/Harry duty so that's my games night. If I want to play more often then I try to get friends to come round after I've done the bath/story/tidying. I also do my best not to spend too much of our money on toys, and tend to use paypal money raised by selling toys/painting to buy more toys. Of course if there isn't a constant stream of parcels arriving it looks better but because I try to buy second hand stuff that doesn't work so well so my purchases are almost always spotted! Overall I reckon I do pretty well, I get to play games a couple of times a week and have more toys than I like to admit to.

[azrael71]

Posts like this always make me laugh
Having to smuggle in the full extent of your purchases, arranging time for events or painting or gaming WTF!
I was lucky enough to find a beautiful, intellegent woman many years ago who also shared my love of all things games 
So as long as chores get done and household expenses get covered I get a freehand in regards my gaming hobby.
The problem with this idyllic setup is I can never get on the games console and she paints better than me
That and the only game she refuses to play is warmaster (too many dice)

[Lex]

The problem with this idyllic setup is I can never get on the games console and she paints better than me

Right, now the ugly thruth is out   

your painting speed is so high cause

a) your missus helps you paint   

or

b) you now spend the time painting that you would otherwise spend on the console.......  (or on the missus  )

[CyberShadow]

I have a painting tray. Basically a very cheap food tray with an edge to it. This always has my current project on it (usually the several last few projects!), the subset of paints to be used, etc. This can then be picked up and stored on top of a cupboard. It is out the way when I dont need it, I dont need to set everything up each time as I just take the tray down, I can change where I paint each time I want to, and it protects any tables that I am working on.

[Evil_and_Chaos]

I ensure that my hobby is cheaper than hers. 

[David Wasilewski]

My friends and I have recently had a good conversation and a laugh over this issue. One of the "universal" truths we found was that, according to our wives 'rules' :

1) Money spent on toy soldiers is a waste of money because you never play with them and you have millions already
2) Money spent on clothes is not a waste because you "need" them to wear as you gain and lose weight and fashions change
3) Money spent on things "for the HOUSE" does not count because it is for the family and is a family purchase
4) Ditto money spent on holidays

Our responses to the above four:

1) We would play far more with toy soldiers if we were allowed
2) We "need" new armies as game fashions/fads change
3) We rarely notice or are interested in things that are bought for the house as we are male
4) We are also not particularly interested in holidays and would rather have a week off work to do some serious painting/gaming

We also noted with amusement that whenever we ask our wives about their latest bag/shoes/outfit they will often say "Oh I've had this for years" or "My mother gave it to me" or "it was £50 but I got it for £5".

I rest my case for the defence 

Dave

[Stomm]

As the one who stays at home to look after the kids, I can quite honestly say that the number of packages addressed to my wife that I've signed for far outweighs the number of packages that I've received. Saying that though, I also don't return 75% of the things that I mail order, or buy on ebay, etc...


However, I have gone a bit mad on purchases for the garden this year, I'm going to tackle the ornamental bed as well as the fruit and veg I've already been growing. Needless to say gardening is a much easier hobby to justify purchases to the wife, especially the blueberry bushes which pretty much paid for themselves last year. In that they produced blueberries that from the shops would have cost at least £100... The bananas, Dahlias, exotic ginger's and the like will just look pretty, although I might be able to put a decent bunch of flowers together for the wife's birthday...