Garage to Gameroom Remodel

[ashhaas]

It started a few months ago. My wife and I were house-hunting, and when I was looking around the garage in one of the listings she says to me, “This would make a great game room and studio for you.”

I was floored.

OF COURSE, I’d love to have a huge garage-sized area to call my own, but I’d never ask for it myself. It just seemed too greedy, but there it was. She had made the offer, and it didn’t take long before a major part of the house-hunting was me making sure that the garage was big enough to serve as my future game room.

We finally settled on a house, and I have begun planning. I have many inspirations to pull from. One was this guy:




Who made an amazing game room for table-top wargaming and miniature painting. You can read all about his room at this link:

[url]https://wargamingworkshop.wordpress.com/gaming/wargaming-room/[/url]

His room is amazing, and I couldn’t design one better for miniature wargaming, but I want a room that isn’t so specialized. I want to be able to play regular boardgames too which would be served better with a lower table and comfortable chairs instead of stools. In the end I want a room that will allow me to:

play boardgames
play large table-top miniature games.
read and store comic books
display miniatures
display weapons (more on this later)
display instruments
assemble & paint miniatures & models
watch movies
play PC computer games
record music

So I need a much more general purpose nerd room, but I think it will all be possible. I’ll be starting with a two-car garage (about 25′ x 25′). As a garage it seems modest-sized, but if you can use your imagination and picture it as an interior room you realize how huge it is. An average bedroom can measure 12 x 12 feet, and this would be 4 times the square footage!

It looks like this:



The above image is facing east into the garage with the door open.



…and here you are looking back the other way towards the closed door (facing Southwest).

So with that as a starting point, I want to pull off the look of an old English study. Something along the lines of this:



Okay…maybe that’s a little too over-the-top posh. I don’t exactly plan on sipping brandy, smoking cigars, and discussing the situation in the African colonies, but this is the basic overall style I kind of want to emulate, even if my room will be a bit more modest and contemporary.

With that in mind, it’s time to find a contractor and see what I need to do next. Wish me luck!

[ashhaas]

For your sake I’m going to skip a few months forward in time from my last post. All that you’ll be missing are countless meetings with my contractor, reviewing the plans, revising the plans, re-revising the plans, RE-re-revising the plans (etc.), and submitting those plans to get approved by Big Brother.

So, finally in the last few weeks actual physical work has begun:



That picture is taken standing in the Southeast corner and facing at the West wall that used to be the garage door.

They took out the garage door first and began framing in a wall. You can see the openings for an entry door on the left and two big 5′ x 5′ windows to the right.



This one is standing in the entry doorway (Southwest) facing the East wall and Northeast corner. It was taken after the first day of framing was done and the workers had cleaned up and left. The window you see will be walled up; I’m planning on putting a TV there that will be hidden by a large painting that slides down into a cabinet. To the left of that will be a large sliding glass door that will someday lead to a deck. To the left of that is another window.

I setup the sawhorses to simulate where my gaming table would be. The computer chair is positioned right where the center of a couch will be (I drew out the roughly estimated dimensions of the couch in chalk on the floor).



This one's standing in the Northeast corner, facing Southwest. They’re going to wall up the furnace too, so that it doesn’t mess up the classic, wood stylings of my game room. The South wall (to the left of the furnace and door in the above picture) is where all my hobby tables will be including desk areas for miniature/model paining, computer gaming, and audio recording.


This is standing in the Northwest corner facing Southeast. There’s another big 5′ x 5′ window on East wall on the other side of the TV.

In the following week they put in the electrical wiring. The lighting controls will consist of 3 dimmer switches. One switch will be for general lighting (recessed ceiling lights). The second will be for a gaming table light which will be similar in style to a pool-table light. The third will control the top socket in all the electrical outlets. Into these outlets I will plug lighting for the bookshelves and miniature display cases.

So the idea with the lighting is that I can have a few lighting presets to create a certain mood:

Game Lighting: game-table light on full, ceiling and bookshelf lights low/off. I want this one to make the room look like the war room in Doctor Strangelove, where the table is bright, but the rest of the room recedes into shadow.
Museum Lighting: display case & shelves lights on full, ceiling & table lights off. This setting is what I will use for first impressions of the room. Dimming the display lighting slightly will also make the room ready for movie watching.
General Use Lighting: ceiling lights on full, other lights off. I’ll use this setting for socializing in the room, reading on the couch, or any variety of other uses.
The following week they cut out the walls where the windows would be:


Here I'm standing in the Southwest corner, facing the Northeast.

This was a pretty exciting step because it revealed how amazing the view would be once it was all done.

More to come...

[ashhaas]

Last week we installed the windows and doors, and then I put in the insulation:


I’m still having trouble getting over how great the views in this room are. Feel free to click on any of the pics below to see it larger:


North Window


East Sliding Door


East Window


North Window



Next we hung and taped the drywall. If you click on the thumbnail above you can see a composite of three shots showing the entire North side of the room (viewed from the Southwest corner). More to come!

[ashhaas]

When we last left off the room was all drywalled with windows and doors installed. Now I needed to figure out what color to paint the thing. I wasn’t sure exactly which color to pick, but I had an idea based on the original old-English-study look that I was going for. I went to my local paint store and grabbed every swatch of color that was close to what I was thinking:



After narrowing it down to my favorite three colors (favorite blue, favorite red, and favorite green) I bought sample cans of paint and did a big section of each wall. This was important since the colors look very different once they’re spread across a wall.

Based on that little experiment I decided to go with the green:



It’s a pretty vivid, saturated green, but I knew that once I installed the cabinetry it would be muted by all that stained wood. Once the green was just peaking out from between shelves and curtains it would become more of an accent than what it is right now (a bold overpowering color).

Once that was done, it was time to work on the ceiling:



I thought that I could just dry-wall the ceiling and be done with it, but our inspector told us that the joists weren’t designed to handle that much weight. My only option was an acoustic-tile ceiling, or a “dropped” ceiling.

This was a real punch to the stomach. I had this specific vision of what I wanted (wood, paintings, rugs, warm lighting, etc.), and I was being told that I would have to make do with a type of ceiling that made me only think of this:



…not quite what I was looking for.

Luckily, after doing some web-research, I learned that not all ceiling tiles had to look like those from a dreary office building. I found a great style from Armstrong.com called “Easy Elegance” that actually looked better than a sheet-rock ceiling.

It was pretty expensive, so much so that it obliterated the rest of my operating budget, but I think it was a good investment since it looks so much better than the office-style alternatives:



All that’s left now is to finish the floor, install the lighting, and, the biggest step of all: installing all the shelving and cabinetry.

With my budget dried-up I’ll have to wait a while before I can get to any of that, but in the meantime I can finally move in all the stuff that goes in this room, so that my wife can stop complaining about the huge pile of nerd-junk in our bedroom:



My comics and boardgames are moved in now, and I’ve added some cheap curtains and some make-shift shelving for the time-being. It’s already getting a TON of use.

[Lord Ezekial]

Wow that is awesome! Can't wait to see more progress.

[ashhaas]

Wow that is awesome! Can't wait to see more progress.

Thanks! I'll try to post more in the next few days.

[ashhaas]

A huge part of pulling off the old English study look I’m trying to achieve is the floor-to-ceiling hardwood cabinets and shelves. Professional looking cabinetry, however, is beyond what I’m capable of doing.

I made up a rough design for the way I want my north wall to look on my computer:



I sent this to several local cabinetry professionals, and the cheapest quote I got back was for fifteen thousand dollars. If I multiplied this by four walls, then we’re talking about SIXTY THOUSAND DOLLARS to complete the room!

I knew immediately that, as intimidating as the prospect seemed, I would have to make these cabinets myself. I spent weeks reading online tutorials and especially videos of people kind enough to share their knowledge, and I was ready to jump right into the deep end of cabinet-building.

I decided to start with the single box of cabinets on the bottom right corner of the north wall as seen here:



This section is the most basic, and would serve as a primer for the rest of the room. Here’s what that corner of the room looked like before I started construction:

[ashhaas]

A cabinet is basically just a box with a hardwood face frame screwed to the front.

I created my plan and from my plan I was able to write up my cut list (the list on the left side of the paper below):




Using my cut list I cut my oak pieces for the face frame:



Then I assembled the face frame using a Kreg jig:



Here’s a picture of the face frame and a piece of the oak veneer plywood that I’d be using for the counter-top:



In that picture, the face frame and counter-top have been wiped down with a wet towel to open the grain and prepare the wood for staining.

…but which color should I stain it? In fact, how did I decide on oak as my wood of choice?

For that story, we have to go back in time several months…(which I'll get to next)...

[Gingerpanda]

So wish I had a garage. . . . . and money, oh and any skills at all with DIY beyond wallpapering!
Nice work, really amazing conversion.

[Psychosplodge]

Nice collection of games. Should have stuck with the Old world library theme though, this modern set up already appears to have attracted an infestation