Like most folks, I have done a wee bit of modelling and sculpting pretty much from the get-go, graduating perhaps a decade ago to greenstuff and truly complex scratch-builds (with individual 28mm figures creeping upwards to 40, 50 and even 60 pieces). For a long time I had liked the idea of converting figures to play characters, teams or armies more than buying the official released figures and increasingly that is just what I did.
And things would probably have toddled along in that vein – real life, work and renovating our fixer-upper home left little time for thinking of minis as any more than a hobby. And then (like in a bad pot-boiler novel) everything change.