racketboy.com

I'm moving into a new place soon, and in the new place we have an extra room available. For the first time ever, I will be using designating a room in my house solely to house my game collection. I've always been reluctant to do this in previous homes because it's just been me and my wife, and it seemed silly to sit in a separate room to her every time I wanted to play a game, so we've always just shared. However, the new house doesn't really have space in the main living room to hold all my games, and I now have a baby who is starting to become mobile, so the appeal of a game room is suddenly more tangible to me - I have images in my head of entering a room and finding a toddler munching on disc 3 of Panzer Dragoon Saga otherwise!

Turning the spare room into a game room is going to be a bit of a project. It's not a huge room (but not awful either, by UK standards!) and I have a lot of stuff that I want to fit in it. As you'll see, there's a bunch of challenges with the room that I'll need to work around or resolve to make it fit for purpose too. To make it a bit more fun and to chronicle the process as I work through, I figured I'd start a thread where you can see my progress on the project, and maybe where I can get some ideas and input from you guys too. Hopefully it'll be fun to look back on at the end, and won't be a thread full of regrets where I chronicle how I destroyed my new house.

My goals for the room are as follows:

1. Find space to store all of my console games.
I'd love to fit my portables in too, but I think the reality is that it's just too much stuff for the space if I do that. They can easily be stored on a bookcase in my office or a spare bedroom. If I can ensure all my console games are available and accessible to play whenever I want, that'll be more than enough. On that note...

2. Have all of my consoles wired in and ready to play
This is going to be a challenge for sure, as it's a LOT of cable management to conquer. I don't need every console plugged in as such, but I want to have access to real hardware to play any of my games on. The complete list of consoles I need to manage are: NES, SNES, N64, Gamecube, Wii, Wii U, Switch, Master System, Mega Drive/Mega CD/32X, Saturn, Dreamcast, XBox, Xbox 360, PS2, PS3, PS4 + PSVR, PS5, PC Engine Duo, Neo Geo and 3DO. Phew, that's a challenge. And just to make it even more of a challenge:

3. Minimise the clutter
When you see game rooms online, people are all about displaying their stuff. Games upon games on shelves, posters everywhere, figurines, arcade cabinets, display kiosks - the works. More power to them, people should do what they enjoy. But what I enjoy is not feeling like I'm in a game store, and not feeling like I'm being imprisoned by walls upon walls of stuff everywhere. All those colours, shapes and visual noise makes me feel stressed. So a key goal for me is figuring out how I can have all of this stuff, and make it accessible - but also keep it somewhat hidden away. On a similar note - game rooms online love darkened rooms with LED lighting, and I'll be honest, I'll probably introduce a little bit of this based on plans I have made - but my goal is to keep the room feeling as natural, bright and airy as possible. Or at least as possible as a modestly sized wall full of bookcases full of hundreds of games can feel.

With regards to your third item: I’ve been hanging on to a picture of this for awhile because I loved that you can have all your stuff organized like games without the massive shelf systems we see in game rooms normally. Might be an idea.

Part 2: Challenges - What we have to work with

For the first proper post towards the project, I wanted to share some pictures of the space I have to work with and show some of the challenges we need to work around.
The room:



Here's some pictures of the room. It's a standard rectangle shape, with the door about half way down one of the walls. The picture above shows the view to the left of the door, towards the front window.

Some challenges right away:
1. The cupboards to the left arent built in, but the wall behind them is open and has exposed cables and pipes. The flooring has also only been done up to the cupboards, so if I remove them I'll need to patch it up.

2. The house has some weird heating system quirks that have resulted in us having 2 radiators for some reason. You can see one along underneath the window, but another one on the right hand wall. This drastically reduces my wall space for shelves etc.

3. The lower section of ceiling by the door limits the height I have for installing shelves and cabinets etc. Not too big a deal over here by the window, but...



Here's the other side of the room. There's less distance on this side from the door to the wall, but really the only challenge other than space is the ceiling, which again has a lower section towards the end of the room.

Additional challenges



Taking a look inside the cupboard shows off the single biggest challenge with the room. See that plug socket on the wall? Yep, that's the plug socket for this room. The only plug socket for the room. For my TV setup alone, I'm estimating I'll need to plug in over 30 devices, so clearly that's not going to cut it. No way around this one, we'll probably need to get an electrician to wire in some more sockets for me.



On the opposite wall, here's a closer look at the bonus radiator. One nice thing about it is both the intake and outlet pipes are running into the radiator from the ceiling. I'm happy to remove the radiator entirely, so we can connect the pipes at the ceiling and remove the whole thing. This will need a plumber though probably...

Side note - you can see what looks to be a double plug socket by the floor there, but don't be deceived. For some stupid reason the previous owners fixed in an extension to the wall. The cable that comes out of it goes all the way around the room...and plugs into the single lone socket on the other side.

You can also see a preview of the first little bit of work I've done for the room, which showcases our next issue:



The cupboards are off! But this is what they were hiding. The missing floor panels aren't a big deal - we actually have spare flooring and underlay in the garage to patch this up. More challenging is the gaps in the plasterboard. Not sure how to address this one, might need to get a builder in in addition to the electrician and plumber we already need. Whilst they're at it, we'll also need them to build a cupboard around the circuit breaker and electric meter, which are hidden on the wall directly behind where the old cupboards used to be (along with a whole bunch of other useless electronics that arent in use which need removed):



So definitely a lot of work to get done. In my next post (which I'll likely put up today) I'll outline the plan I have for the room layout and furniture.

Part 3: Layout plans

Here's a quick draft of what I plan to do with the room layout. There are probably better tools to use for this but the ones I tried were a bit unwieldy, so I ended up using Excel



You can I've noted Besta cabinets in against the wall opposite the door. This is a type of Ikea cabinet I am planning for using for my tv cabinet. I'll probably dive into that in much more depth in a future post, but generally the reason is that it's pretty big and can hold lots of consoles. I'll need space to store controllers next to that. On the smaller side of the room further from the window I'll be putting in all of my shelves to hold my games. I'll probably just use Billy Bookcases from ikea for this job as they're cheap, easy to get rearrange and add extra shelves too, and can have doors added easily to cover up the wall of games, as per my initial goals.

I've got about enough room for a 2 seater sofa with a sidetable on the other side of the door - I'd love a sidetable each side but the space means I don't think it'll be possible. This sofa will be under the circuit breaker cupboard too so I need to be careful with headroom. A coffee table can go in the middle but it needs to be easy to move as I'm hoping I'll have just enough room between the sofa and cabinet to play VR games - we'll have to wait and see on this one I think - won't know if this is doable until I try!

And that's the general plan. Hopefully it'll all come together as I imagine without too many hiccups!

Gucci wrote: ↑Wed Jul 03, 2024 5:31 pm With regards to your third item: I’ve been hanging on to a picture of this for awhile because I loved that you can have all your stuff organized like games without the massive shelf systems we see in game rooms normally. Might be an idea.

This is awesome, definitely something I'd consider in future. I think this set up would use too much of my space in this fairly small room though, and I can't imagine it would be cheap to make something like that!

There was a stint where I was looking at multimillion dollar listings out of pure fantasy and this was from a $10+million home so yeah, I’d imagine it would be quite expensive

I say out of pure fantasy because back then I couldn’t even afford a shed. Today it’s barely a cardboard box…

Do both radiators function? I see you're planning on taking the small one out. How is that going to affect the heating in that room during the winter time?

opa wrote: ↑Thu Jul 04, 2024 7:39 am Do both radiators function? I see you're planning on taking the small one out. How is that going to affect the heating in that room during the winter time?

Yep, they both function. The heating in the house is a bit weird.

The radiator I'm removing is from the original heating system that was put in when the house was built. In our living room we have a working fireplace, which has a water tank behind it. When the fire is on it heats the water tank which supplies hot water to radiators around the house.

The longer radiator I'm leaving in is connected to a newer heating system which was put in later. This is connected to a standard combi-boiler. Seeing as this is far more efficient, easier to control, easier to maintain (no chimneys need swept) and safer (open fireplaces and crawling babies do not mix), we will almost definitely be using this one 99.9% of the time.

I don't have any concerns that the room will be cold in the winter. It's a fairly small room (dimensions are roughly 9 foot by 15 foot) and a pretty large radiator.

Very cool to see your planned layout of the room AJ, even if it was done in Excel. Lol.

I'm in agreement with you, in regards to not enjoying the maximalist aesthetic of many game rooms. If I get a chance to have a dedicated space in the future, I really just want a few shelves for my games and maybe a series of three or four posters.

Regarding those sliding cabinets Gucci shared a picture of, I saw an interview with the owner of Mega Cat Studios, and he was chatting a bit about his game room and storage, and had similar cabinets. Very nice indeed! However, it seems like something you'd need a ton of room for.

A few minor updates on this project today

First off, the electrician has been in, and we have more plug sockets now!:

The single plug socket I originally had is now a double:


And I now have 8 sockets to use on the opposite wall:


The plan is to use the 6 close by sockets for the TV cabinet with a bunch of extension cords, and have the other 2 free to run power for anything else I might want in the room. The 2 on the opposite wall will be behind the sofa, so I can use those for lighting and also charging any devices.


Secondly, this week we finally moved in properly. We also had a big ikea delivery of all the shelving and the TV cabinet for the room. None of it is assembled yet - getting the living room, kitchen and bedroom ready for my wife and daughter took priority, followed by setting up my office as I work from home - but I'm excited to finally get stuck in.

Unfortunately, that means the room is just stacked with boxes of games, consoles, magazines, controllers and flatpacked furniture currently:





I'm hoping the next update will have thing's starting to neaten up a bit. My plan is to start with the bookshelves first as I will be able to clear the most boxes once I can store magazines and games on the shelves. Also hoping to deal with the extra radiator by the time I update next!

There's been a lot going on with the game room and I've got an absolute ton of things to post in the thread, but for today I'm going to share my progress on my storage for my game collection.

Before that, one nice quick update is that the extra radiator has been removed, so that gives me some extra wall space to work with:


As per my plan, I decided to go with bookshelves in a U shape around the back of the room - I put them up over a couple of days, but I eventually got them all set up and roughly in place. The bigger shelves will hold all my games, and the smaller ones will be corner cabinets and have display items on the shelves.


And a clearer view in the daytime:


The next step (after securing them to the wall) was to get all of the games on. I didn't pay attention to alphabetising or anything here - the goal was to get them on the shelves and figure out where I needed to add the extra shelves I'd bought. You can see here that there's definitely some needed for my Nintendo games as most of the cartridges are 2 deep:


After adding the extra shelves, I attached doors to the larger bookshelves so that the games weren't all on display. As mentioned in the first post, I'm keen to have them all accessible but not necessarily visible at the end of this. Here's that Nintendo shelf from before adjusted with extra shelves. The bottom shelf will be for gaming magazines which I still need to unpack:


And here's a Sega shelf I did too:


I also still need to order a few more shelves as I ran out of spares and can definitely fit more on some of these. I'll post all of the interior shelve setups after I've added those.


And here's the final view with all the doors on. Some of my display items are on the corner shelves now - but they're also holding a bunch of extra stuff I still need to sort out yet. I'll share the final layout once the whole room is done.