You Americans are spoiled with hobby space. I'm just drooling when I see the various attics and man-caves gamers from the States present in their blogs and videos. Our small Nordic houses usually lack it (there was a study on the matter: our flats are smaller), so we're accustomed to build & paint where we can, and always tidy up when done, to free space for other aspects of life.
I never really took the old attic for granted. For all it's faults, I felt fortunate to have had it. In fact, most of the places I've lived since college have been great
old (American) midwest homes & apartments, with large rooms, high ceilings, etc. So maybe I've been spoiled.
Part of what's different for me now is having to find a house in a city with a good school system. I don't know how it works in other part of the world, but here a large part of school funding is usually based on local property taxes, and levies voted on by the residents of the district. Districts are usually only a single city, or maybe two or three adjacent cities working together. This presents a number of problems and drastic inequalities between school districts. For example, the city in which I grew up was a post WWII suburb, mostly built & populated after the war. Most of the citizens were elderly, most of the schools in the district (three cities) had closed down & consolidated, and school funding levies were generally voted down, while tax levies for turning schools into senior citizen's centers, or other programs for old people generally passed and got all the funding. More generally, what we found as we were looking was that we could find plenty of great houses in districts with poor schools (which is how I've lived the past 15 years, prior to being a parent) or we could find a small and/or run down house in a good district. The house we found is far from ideal, but we're doing to for the schools. We lucked out in getting a tiny old house on an old street in a city where a lot of people with far more money than us are buying up the land, tearing down the old houses, and building tacky McMansions.
At any rate, we've got a strange, small house. I do plan on working out some sort of more humble painting space, but haven't figured out how to do it yet.
It's doable, it's enjoyable. You will eventually manage the downgrade of hobby space. It could give you more reason to visit your local stores/clubs, which should be positive, shouldn't it.
The primary problem is that I don't usually have any free time until long after stores close. The secondary problem is that I have very different taste in gaming from most of the people I've met at stores. (More competitive/tournament. I did that for quite a while, but got burned out.)