Garage to Gameroom Remodel

[40kGamer]

The game room is looking awesome! I can't wait to trade houses in a few years and move mine out of the basement. I also love your views of the hilly exterior terrain... I really hate the pancake flat landscape of Ohio.

[ashhaas]

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

Yes…all of those things help, and thanks!

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The game room is looking awesome! I can't wait to trade houses in a few years and move mine out of the basement. I also love your views of the hilly exterior terrain... I really hate the pancake flat landscape of Ohio.

Thank you!

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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

HA HA…indeed it has.

[ashhaas]

So…back to how I picked out the wood species and stain color:

I went to my local home improvement store and bought one piece each of oak, birch, and poplar, as well as five shades of wood stain. Then I taped off the wood into different sections and labeled the sections to remember which stain was which:



The results ended up like this:



I ended up picking oak for the wood, and one of the darker shades for the stain. Here is my face frame and counter top after staining:



Now it was time to cut the remaining pieces and put the whole thing together. Using the cabinet design ideas that came with my Kreg jig, I built a top frame to screw the counter top to:



Then I cut some melamine particle board (melamine is just the smooth white surface) and drilled the holes that would make the shelves adjustable. (Note to others: it turns out they make melamine boards with the holes already pre-drilled…but I didn’t know that until later.)

Then I used my Kreg jig to drill all the pocket holes into the melamine pieces that would become the box of the cabinet:



Now that all the different pieces were all cut and drilled all I needed to do was assemble the whole thing. It was like having all the contents of a box from Ikea.

This was actually one of the hardest parts about this project: the fact that I didn’t know if everything was cut to the right size until all the parts were ready to put together. Everything up to this point had taken almost a week of non-stop work, and I wouldn’t know if I had made a mistake until the next couple hours of assembling the pieces was over.

The time for assembly had come, and here comes another Kreg commercial, because I bought their pocket-join clamp as well as their corner clamps. Without them the assembly would not have been possible:



Once both sides were attached to the bottom, I screwed the face frame on. It can be seen here assembled upside-down:



Now that the face frame was attached, the cabinet had enough stability to be flipped right-side-up:



I screwed the top frame in next, and realized that I had made a mistake. It seemed like a good idea to make the pocket holes symmetrical on both top frames, but once they were installed I realized that the screws from one frame would get in the way of the screws from the other:



Luckily I was able to clamp the Kreg jig onto the top frame while it was already mostly installed and add some new holes.

On the bottom I added some adjustable feet, so that I could get the thing level when I installed it:



On the next post I'll be installing the cabinet in the game room, and starting my biggest project yet: my board game shelves!

[ashhaas]

Whoops…I forgot something: before I install the cabinet in the game room I needed to add a piece of trim moulding to cover the edge of the oak veneer plywood. I called Superior Moulding, in California, and had them ship me out a bunch of samples to try out. They actually don’t normally give out samples, so I had to pay for 1 foot sections of the mouldings I thought might work out:



Once I had selected the style I liked I put in a big order to last me for half of the game room cabinets. Then I nailed a piece to the cabinet after I had stained it:



Then I varnished the whole thing with spar urethane. I went with a satin finish, which I think ended up looking pretty good:



Feeling pretty accomplished at this point I paused to reflect on all I had achieved while warming up with some homemade hot cocoa my wife brought out to me. For those of us with Northmen’s blood, there’s nothing better than cocoa and carpentry on a cold rainy day:



But it was soon time to cut my introspection short - it was finally time to install the cabinet:



Even better than that, I could now FILL the cabinet with all of my nerdy flotsam:



I’ve got everything in there from miniatures on the left, Magic the Gathering in the middle, to G.I. Joe figures and vehicles on the right.

I’m not going to build and install the doors until all the cabinets in the room are built. That way I can do them all at once. That’s fine with me; just having a place to store my boxes of junk is satisfying enough for now.

So…NOW I can start on my board game shelves (next post).

[ashhaas]

In my last Game Room post I finished the first set of cabinets in the lower-right corner of the north wall. My next task would be tackling the over-sized shelves between the windows:



These will eventually hold my board game collection, so the shelves will have more space between them than a standard book shelf. As highlighted above I’d start with the bottom half of the shelves.

I’d noticed during my research that a lot of the shelves in these old English study designs have a big chunky look, almost like they have thick wood columns in some places:



This would cost a lot more in materials, but I knew the pay off would be worth it, so I decided to create my own wood pillars. I drew up my plans and a cut list; my design for the pillars is in the bottom-right corner:



Here’s my first pillar with one side attached to the wood spacers using pocket-hole joinery:



…and here are all three of the pillars waiting for the casing moulding to be attached:



Just like the edge-moulding from the last post, I had ordered a few of samples of casing from Superior Moulding as seen below:



I ended up picking out the casing on the right. I attached it to the pillars with a finishing nail-gun. With the pillars finished I cut the plywood for the shelves that I would hang between them:



In my next post I'll assemble and install the shelves.

[ashhaas]

So, using pocket-holes in the shelf pieces, I put the pillars and shelves together. Here it is from the back:



…and here it is from the front:



In that picture I’ve already added a piece of oak to the bottom shelf, and I’ve also added the moulding to the front of the middle shelves. The counter-top looks thin and is still awaiting the moulding to finish it off.

I went ahead and put on that moulding with a nail gun, added some adjustable feet, and my wife, helped me carry this beast up to the game room to test the fit:



You probably didn’t notice, but my plans I drew up had the whole unit as 33 inches tall, but if you look at my plans for the cabinets I already completed, you’ll see that I designed them to be 33.5 inches tall. My new shelves were the wrong size!

Luckily I was able to solve this with the simple addition of a half-inch thick piece of wood on the bottom.

Next, my wife put her life in jeopardy helping me carry the shelves back to the barn where I stained and varnished them, and then carried them back to permanently install them:



In the right back corner of that picture you can see some discoloration from the stain not penetrating a spot with glue residue. That won’t be a problem when the upper-half of the shelves is covering it up. Here are the shelves from the other angle. I think they match well with the already installed cabinets:



In my next post I’ll create the shelves that will sit on top of these.

[ashhaas]

Now it's time to build the upper half of my game shelves. I've circled them in my north wall diagram below:



I started construction of my pillars - just like I did with my bottom shelves:



After that I cut the shelves:



With both pillars and shelves complete it was time to assemble the whole module of shelving:



The broad strokes of construction were essentially done at this point, but I still had a lot left to do. For one, I intended to light my shelves using LED strip lights. I wanted the lights to be recessed, so I flipped the whole shelving unit over and used a router to cut out a groove on the leading edge of the shelves where I could hide the lights:



Next I had to run some wire. I fed the wires down through the pillar and used a zip-tie to fish them out of the next hole below:



Once that was done I stained and varnished the shelves. Then I began sticking the strip-lights to the back of the moulding on each of the shelves. This is where the groove I had cut came in handy:



After carrying this huge wooden beast up to the game room I added all the components to the top of the shelves. I was running a surge-protector down through one of the pillars to an outlet that was controlled by a dimmer on the wall. Into that surge protector was a 110VAC-to-12VDC controller that could handle the load of all my future lighting needs and, most importantly, would dim the lights (something that is not usually possible with DC powered LEDs plugged into a dimmable outlet). I labeled everything clearly to help me in the event of any future trouble-shooting (knock on wood). All these components would be hidden behind the crown moulding:



After mounting the upper shelves on top of the lower ones, I was ready to let the varnish cure, after which I would load the shelves with my games. Here is my old game storage system made of scrap wood and cinder blocks:



…and here is my new set of shelves with the LED lighting on:



(continued in the next post…)

[ashhaas]

Speaking of lighting, in all of my previous posts I never explained how I ended up lighting the game room. I installed (with a professional electrician’s help) a bunch of recessed LED lights in the ceiling. They look like this:



I like how the lenses are translucent white, so that when the lights are off they just look like part of the ceiling tiles. In addition to the area lighting I put in some bright down-lights to illuminate the gaming table separately. As I explained in my first post, all three sets of lights (area lights, gaming table lights, and bookshelf lights) are controlled by a wall dimmer, so that I can set the mood with a variety of lighting options.

I usually use “all-purpose mode” which has the bookshelves and gaming table lights off, and the general down lights on full as seen here:



As you can see I also put in a sofa, chair, coffee table, and small game table. Whenever we play a boardgame I go into “gaming mode” with all lights off except the gaming table:



…and last of all, now that I have my bookshelf lights installed I finally have “museum mode.” In this mode all the shelves and display cases (which will eventually surround the whole room) are lit up and the overhead lights are either off or dimmed very low like below:



So, now you're all caught up to today, so any future progress posts will come more slowly. The next time I revisit this thread I’ll either be making the upper shelves to the right or maybe even the lower set of drawers to the left. We’ll just have to wait and see.

You can also read more details on my blog: [url]https://craftyjack.wordpress.com[/url]

Thanks for reading!

-Jack

[Wolfshade]

Looks awesome

[ashhaas]

Looks awesome

Thank you.