Pimped up Detolf

After some break caused by moving to a new apartment I am back again 🙂 This time it is not a post about painted miniatures but about place to store them. For my new workshop I bought Ikea Detolf – quite common furniture in any miniature painter’s / collector’s room – probably because its affordable price. The standard cabinet has only 3 shelves with spaces between them about 400mm. I don’t plan to paint such huge monsters, so I decided to organize the space in more economical way.
I ordered 7 glass tiles in size of existing shelves (385mm x 292mm x 4mm). I also bought 6mm steel plain rods and cut them to the right length (316mm). I went to local workshop to have them welded to the original structure (I had to remove the paint from points where the new rods were to be attached). After that I painted the new rods with anti-corrosion grey paint, and then sprayed the whole metal elements with grey gloss paint to obtain uniformed color of new and old parts. Now I have 11 levels to put my miniatures – from 270mm at the bottom (for the bigger monsters or buildings) to about 130-150mm on the other levels. That should be enough for any 28-80mm scale miniatures I plan to paint in the future.

Display cabinet

Display cabinet

Display cabinet
Even large monsters from Mierce Miniatures fit well on 130mm shelves.

Display cabinet
Finaly I have place to display my 300mm x 300mm 3D Bases from Manorhouse Workshop.

I also bought some self-adhesive brush tape to make my cabinet dust-proof. I used 2 sizes of it – 4mm high for area of hinges and 8mm high for all the other areas around the door.

Display cabinet

All these alterations (glass tiles, steel rods, welding, paint and brush tape) costed me as much as the cabinet itself. Was it worth it? If you don’t have unlimited space in your miniatures warehouse and you want to organize the space in a wise way – I think it was worth it.

2 thoughts on “Pimped up Detolf”

  1. Funny I was just looking at these in IKEA.. i think you have pushed me over the edge to buying one now… My one thought was there could be more shelves/less space in between

    1. The most expensive part of the upgrade was the cost of glass tiles (about 70% of total cost). If you have an access to cheaper glass tiles, then the upgrade would be more affordable.

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