Discuss Your Gaming Environments and AV Setups
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fastbilly1
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fast's geekhouse in progress

by fastbilly1 Thu Sep 05, 2013 3:58 pm

So I have been prodded enough, mostly by Ack, to show me building my gameroom. Now this is going to be updated very randomly (since I have a couple other high profile projects going on), but I figured it is easiest to get feedback on one topic instead of several different topics. But since both my wife and I are gamers, this is less of a gameroom, more of a geekhouse.

Background:
My wife and I bought our house earlier this year and we are slowly modifying it to be more unique. While the house is almost perfect for us, I had to concede the extra bedroom to the wife for craft work (well partially concede since my craft stuff will be in there aswell), it means I did not have a dedicated place for gaming with a door. Our basement is one big room in a backward E, with a wet bar and half bath on the garage side, a fireplace on the other, and an Emergency room under the steps. The garage is for my workshop and a soundstage. So my gaming area will be on the fireplace side with room high mirrors (roughly 15x20).

So what will be updated here, well most everything about the house that is geek/gaming related. We have lots of plans, but haven’t moved on any of them so here is a list so yall can see what we are planning on doing, and so we can keep track of them digitally.

Now why did I decide to do it this way, what is my angle? The truth of the matter is that over the past decade I have read many blog posts about how people built their gamerooms or game basements, and others about how they built their gardens or backyard theaters. Those sites and topics gave me so many great ideas and really let me see how other people work through their problems. So I thought the best way for me to “give back” for lack of a better phrase, is to do something like this. So some of this will not be directly gaming related, but all of it should be interesting to atleast to someone out there. Now if you don’t like the concept for the update, that’s fine, theres dozens of other subforums, and thousands of other topics. Feel free to question anything I post about, that’s fine. Even if you think it is a stupid question, it is better to get an answer than to just sit and wonder.

That said, some of these projects will be specific to our needs and will not really be applicable to others – ie I do not believe many of you are going to be figuring out how to fit seven or eight pcs in your gameroom, or where to put an R2D2 store cooler. But then again, those odd issues usually make reading things more interesting.

List of Completed projects
Kitchen Stools
Shelving
Cathedral Radio
TV Stand
Wall art
Sound System
Computer Area
Retrogaming area/cart - updated to MAME Cab
PC Radio Tower case
Raised Beds
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Frag Mortuus
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Re: fast's geekhouse in progress

by Frag Mortuus Thu Sep 05, 2013 4:20 pm

Awesome!

I am really looking forward to this. My wife and I plan on buying a house in the coming years with some "must haves" in mind. First and foremost is a space for my game room/home theater and a space for my wife to dedicate to her photography and crafts. Lastly, I would love to have a playroom for the kids as well. That way they can keeps their grubby hands off my stuff :lol:

I love looking at others game rooms. I love to see how they display their treasures. I enjoy designing spaces so much that I kind of wish I would have gone into Interior Design instead of I.T. but there isn't much of a market for it in rural WV. :lol:

Can't wait to see the progress pics!
noiseredux wrote:Frag Mortuus rules.


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BoneSnapDeez
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Re: fast's geekhouse in progress

by BoneSnapDeez Thu Sep 05, 2013 4:23 pm

Frag Mortuus wrote:I am really looking forward to this. My wife and I plan on buying a house in the coming years with some "must haves" in mind. First and foremost is a space for my game room/home theater and a space for my wife to dedicate to her photography and crafts. Lastly, I would love to have a playroom for the kids as well. That way they can keeps their grubby hands off my stuff :lol:


Haha this is what I keep telling my wife.

She thinks I want to live in some kind of mansion, but really a 4-bedroom house (like the one we currently rent) would suffice.

Looking forward to the pics, fasty.
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Re: fast's geekhouse in progress

by Blu Thu Sep 05, 2013 7:32 pm

This will be more exciting than all of the shows we watch on HGTV. You'll be like Bob Vila, only cooler. Looking forward to it, Billy!
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Re: fast's geekhouse in progress

by fastbilly1 Fri Sep 06, 2013 11:03 am

Well I am no Bob Villa, but I have watched alot of This Old House, so lets start with a project finished this week...

Library - Shelving mark one:
My wife and I are both huge readers. We have over a thousand books, in paperback or hardback, and several thousand digitally. We are also big boardgame fans, and have about two hundred of them. But we are not huge fans of having rooms we do not use. So our traditional "Living Room" is our Library. We inherited some crush red velvet furniture from my wife's grandparents, painted the walls Sage Green and Spice Delight white (since it is a Dune Reference and all the whites end up looking the same overtime), and setup two 15 inch deep Billy Bookcases. We initially spaced them about six feet apart so we could do this:
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Yes we project Doctor Who in our library...like I said Geek House. Actually most rooms have a Tardis in it. Since my wife was concerned about the book cases falling over, I took a eight foot long 2x4 and stained it a dark mahogany to match the book cases. And since my saw horses are being used outside for something pool related, I used some golf chairs that my company was throwing away. They are a bit lower, but they worked well.
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The 2x4 was attached to the studs with two deck screws which were painted with a dark brown paint to blend in, and then the bookcases were screwed into the 2x4. Luckily with the height of the shelves, and the eventual things on top, you cannot see the 2x4. (Ignore the other things you see in this picture - they will come up in later posts).

And since we were in Atlanta last weekend we decided it was time to finish off the set, so two standard depth half Billys, and one more 15 inch deep with doors and we have this:
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The doors on the bottom hide most of our boardgames, sadly the bigger ones like Rebound and Ogre DE will not fit so they will sit on top. So now the hard part of organizing starts. The only thing decided is that the shallow ones will hold paperbacks and the middle one holds books we cannot replace. Like my Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass that my fathers mother use to read to me when I was a child, or the survival books my mothers father had in his bombshelter. Or anything signed by the author, like my Dinotopias or my wife's Anne McAffree and Peter Beagle's.

We love the Billy system for everything except the door openers. They have a push to open mechanism which is just a disaster (atleast to us). So I plan on finding some crystal drawer pulls at one of the nearby fleamarkets and installing those. The center one may also get a piece of felt down the center gap just to make sure everything stays safe, and probably a clamp on the top so people do not open it by chance (adults or children).

Still left to do with shelving:
1. Organize
2. Four more shelves for half sized bookcases
3. Door knobs for bookcases
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Sano
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Re: fast's geekhouse in progress

by Sano Fri Sep 06, 2013 12:50 pm

Keep the pictures coming man. I love looking at other peoples setups. Gives me ideas for my own. :mrgreen:
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Re: fast's geekhouse in progress

by fastbilly1 Fri Sep 06, 2013 3:29 pm

Foyer:
Faux Stain Glass

So my house is a split level at the foyer. So the foyer is really about 8ft by 4ft with a 17ft ceiling. It is great and lets alot of light to enter our Library. However, at night it lets anyone driving by look in on us. So we have decided we need to add a diffusion cling to the dome and want to add faux stain glass to the pains.

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The stain glass is achieved by taking a piece of glass or plexiglass, drawing a design with a sharpie on it, tracing the design with fake leading (either painted hotglue or actual fake leading), then filling in the gaps with the colors. From 10 feet away it looks great, even though you cannot do any complex shapes or paint on it. Case in point, you end up with something that looks like this:
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We have 10 windows that are 12 inches by 6 inches, and one that is 12 inches by 62. The one thing that is certain is that we will have the Eye of Sauron from the Middle Earth CCG above the door, but other than that we have not fully decided what to do. We are planning a mixture of gaming and fantasy related items, like are Mario 1 pipe coming up the side with a piranha plant in it and a Mario 2 vine with a hoopster - or just some clouds behind it. My wife does want some mermaids at the bottom of one side, so I will have to figure that one out. So do yall have any suggestions?


MECCG Eye of Sauron:
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Frag Mortuus
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Re: fast's geekhouse in progress

by Frag Mortuus Fri Sep 06, 2013 9:31 pm

It's awesome that you all are going to do gaming themed stained glass.
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samsonlonghair
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Re: fast's geekhouse in progress

by samsonlonghair Sat Sep 07, 2013 8:40 am

Here's some inspiration for your stained glass. Megan Lara made these art nouveau prints of video game ladies in the style of Alphonse Mucha.
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You've probably seen these before. They were a big smash on the intertubes about two years ago. Still pretty cool today.
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fastbilly1
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Re: fast's geekhouse in progress

by fastbilly1 Mon Sep 09, 2013 11:55 am

samsonlonghair wrote:Here's some inspiration for your stained glass. Megan Lara made these art nouveau prints of video game ladies in the style of Alphonse Mucha.

You've probably seen these before. They were a big smash on the intertubes about two years ago. Still pretty cool today.

I am a huge fan of art nouveau, but sadly those are too complicated for what we are doing. I have similar art for the main five of Sailor Moon.

Sadly, my wife has been exceptionally sick over the past few days and the paint used for faux stained glass makes her queasy so stain glass is on hold till later.

Den:
TV Area


BUT a series of adventures over the weekend led to a find that lead us to work on the Den. We have been using our coffee table as a TV stand for a couple months, but that leads to a series of issues.
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First off, no coffee table. Secondly, no easy place to put equipment. So we hit up a nearby set of antique malls to find something suitable. I was looking for a pie safe or china cabinet bottom, but none were in our price range, though I did find the Ritz Cracker 1986 Anniversary tin that I had been looking for for several years. But on a whim we stopped at a Goodwill and found this fella:
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Which earlier in the week was marked at $50, but was marked at $20. And the first Saturday in the month they drop the price of everything by half. So we went and it rung up at $7. The cashier was irked by this but said "well since you brought it up here, what the hell." I guess it helps that I am in there every few days... The top had a myriad of scratches all over it, but a wood touchup pen and an hour later and you could not tell. Now it looks like this:
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It is higher than the coffee table by a good bit, but it means you are looking at it straight on while sitting down. It worked out well for our night of MST3k.

We are looking to add some sort of storage units on the side and a rack so we can keep more than one console setup at a time (since I do not like stacking modern consoles). So for now the 360 is in the cardboard box to the left and the Wii is in the big brown bag of awesomeness. Only the Wiiu and Bluray player are hooked up, but eventually the bottom area will be a HTPC, with the WiiU and a VCR being above it. The boxes on the right are full of game console boxes that do not have their shelf built yet.
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