My New and Improved Gaming Table

One of my hobby resolutions for this year was to improve my gaming table. It's taken me until May to get round to it but today I broke up my old table and rebuilt it into something a lot more useful. On the right you can see the end result but here's a run down of the process.

First off here's my old table. Basically it was an old desk that came with our old house. The board in the background is the top of the table that I made a while ago. The long sides of the desk are pretty much perfectly sized to make the short sides of the new table. This will give me the legs without having to pay a penny.

Here I've broken up the desk and saved the legs which I've loosely attached to the table. As you can see the existing table top will be used as the basis for the new one.

In order to make it sturdy I've screwed on some 200mm x 20mm timber to give it a secure frame. This is probably a bit excessive but basically my Dad had this wood lying around in his garage so it saves me forking out for some. I've then flipped the table over at this point because it's probably the last point at which I'll be able to lift it on my own! The frame around the bottom will eventually be home to some shelves to keep my scenery on.

Here's the first of the pair of narrow shelves that will run the length of the long sides. These will be for dice, templates, books, models etc. Basically the idea is to keep as much as possible hidden away under the table instead of cluttering up the gaming surface. The shelf is screwed onto the legs with some 90 degree brackets and then the upright is screwed onto the underside of the table before the two long boards are screwed together.

This picture shows the second shelf has gone in. After that there's a couple of pics to show the size of the shelves. I've got plenty of space for all of my dice and gaming aids and the shelf is tall enough to allow even large models to be kept under there in reserve.

I've now added some old shelving boards underneath to give me some scenery storage space. Sadly it's all still just sprayed black at the moment.

To tie the whole thing together I'm going to paint the whole thing at some point but for now I'm knackered!

Conclusion
Well I'm pretty chuffed with how it's turned out. I'm sure once I start using it I'll find things that need tweaking but the main aim of the table was to create more space in the room by allowing for more junk underneath the table and more space to store reserves and dead guys during games. In that regard it's certainly going to do the job. All told the whole thing cost me about £15. That was just the cost of buying the brackets and screws. Everything else I salvaged from elsewhere but I reckon you could easily do the whole thing for less than £50 which in the scheme of things isn't too bad.

The next step in this process is to work on the gaming surface. I want to refresh my existing tiles and give them a new colour scheme. After that I want to get the table itself painted up into another scheme so that I can have some variety in my games.

Once both those things are done I'm going back to work on my scenery and working on getting everything based and painted so that my games a more immersive than they are right now.

For now though it's back to getting my Tau up to scratch for Blog Wars 5. More on them soon.