Why Your "Pile of Shame" Isn't USELESS

"Think not of the books you’ve bought as a ‘to be read’ pile. Instead, think of your bookcase as a wine cellar. You collect books to be read at the right time, the right place, and the right mood." -Luc van Donkersgoed Replace books with minis

"No one likes a scalper. Not even their mothers." Heh. Love it. I'm in the process of moving, and have rediscovered a whole new pile of potential up in my attic that I'd squirrelled away over the years - well, old pile of potential really, but looking forward to sorting through this stuff when I have the time.

My pile of shame turned into my new Stargrave crew, recently.

I just painted 11 mostly 70s metal D&D minis from one of those boxes in the lead mountain. 40-50 years in the pile, finally ready.

My "pile of shame" is actually an Archive of Acceptability. Every unpainted mini I have is primed black, either overbrushed white or zenithal sprayed, based, mounted on paint stir sticks, organized by type/concept, and stored in stacking boxes.

My pile of shame has helped me jump on minis agnostic games as they come out. when Turnip 28 came out, I was able to convert a bunch of leftover Viking plastics into a bunch of creepy fishermen. Old Reaper Bones minis laying around became Stargrave and Frostgrave bands.

I have no shame. Or pile of it. I wanted to own minis as a kid and could never afford many if any. Now I look at them painted or unpainted and feel absolute joy. So do what you want and enjoy life and the little piles of plastic men & monsters

I recently sold off like 70% of my pile of shame and made $600. Be honest with yourself, do you still actually want to paint that? No? Okay well sell it and go buy something you actually wanna paint

I came to this hobby from the Gundam & plastic model universe, so I was deep into the habit of buying stuff that had parts that I "might need" for kitbashing sometime. My upstairs closet was already full of little robot boxes and now my hobby space is filling up with boxes of GW & resin bits.... I'm probably going to die without opening half of them!

I've never felt shame about my bitz boxes. Love kitbashing, sculpting and having loads of options to mess around with!! 😊

I still think that one of the reasons that the GW kits have pieces spread all across each sprue was to make it more difficult for people that buy kits for the purpose of parting out the individual mini's. It would force them to put a lot more work into finding and cutting out all the pieces for a single mini. The hope being that more sellers would decide that it was too much work and not do it.

Kitbashing takes up almost all of my hobby hours atm. Bought a box of the old MK3 Heresy Tactical Marines last year because I've always really liked the iron clad aesthetic, it's modular design and *especially* for it's compatibility with older multi-part kits. Plan was to start a Blackshield force for Zone Mortalis games at the LFGS... Since seeing how much these kits re-sell for after their cancellation I've been making every kind of excuse not to break the cellophane. Up-side is I still managed to build about a 1000pts of marauding rag-tag renegades but instead by using up leftover bits from the older Apocalypse set, Dark Vengeance, Cailth and Prospero kits. Love your our Necromunda builds.

Well said 👏 If you want to have a pile of shame, you do you. If you want to buy kits and build straight away, do that. My only advice is if you move house, don't put all your sprues in a bin bag which someone might mistake for rubbish and throw away £200 worth of models.

I sold mine off. My pile of shame was making me have a lot of painting paralysis. Getting rid of it helped me start painting again. I'd rather just buy something when I'm ready to paint it and keep next to no backlog

I feel the kitbashing, just bought and build the cities of sigmar command corps and couldn't decide which head option to use for the arch-knight. After looking at my pile of potential, I made a chaos chosen into another arch knight, and it worked really well. I'm so happy to have a fish knight and a bear knight now.

"yarn adjacent stuff" - brilliant!

I recently painted a metal Great Unclean One that I bought around 2001 or so. It was in my pile the entire time. I don't mind having a large collection.

My tower of ambition is being worked on. the recent price increases helped.

Ah... Uncle Atom's box of heads (TM) always good to hear about it getting dusted off :P

On the “out of sight, out of mind” topic: I love opening a box in my garage and seeing some minis I bought years ago. It’s like Christmas! And most of the time it renews my interest in that game.