The Gameroom
My gameroom is under construction. Therefore, so is this web page.
Update: Construction has about wrapped up. Now I'm working on furnishings and getting organized.
We moved into our new home around 2004. The home featured more than 2,000 sqft of unfinished basement (with walkout). The space was completely empty except for utilities and the stairway. During the winter of 06/07 I built a basement bathroom (with urinal). The next winter I built my home office. During the winter of 08/09 I finally built my gameroom and workshop. And by 2010 the gameroom's mini-kitchen was finished up. All the while I was collecting games and having to shuffle machines around various phases of construction. The finished gameroom is around 800 sqft.
The Bally lineup.
The Williams lineup.
The mini-kitchen (a.k.a. the adult beverage and snack center).
The retro bar table and stools are from Bars and Booths (www.barsandbooths.com). I highly recommend this place for your retro furniture needs.
The table and stool patterns are Red Glacier Boomerang and Red Cracked Ice.
For a touch of '80s arcade decor I added a "Space Voyage" black light rug.
At first I wasn't sure how to effectively pop the rug with all the other ambient light in the room. Then I decided to add black lights right to the underside of the table. I used four F15T8-BLB florescent black light tubes. The effect is just what I wanted. The fixtures are wired together and the main cord is routed down inside the table pedestal. Although the fixtures require only two conductor power cords, I used a three conductor main cord and grounded all the metal table parts.
My "retro" home theater including a 35" low-def Zenith and my high school stereo for full 2.0 surround sound.
Belle is in charge of gameroom security, parts cleaning and ping–pong ball retrieval.
Can't have a basement gameroom without a man–friendly basement bathroom. Having a home urinal has been a life ambition of mine.
Lights and other Doo-dads...
I racked my brain trying to come up with a creative color scheme for the gameroom. But ultimately I ended up with plain white walls and ceilings. I decided to decorate with colored light instead. Light is more flexible and I can "redecorate" without repainting the room. General lighting is provided by several chrome bathroom light bars fitted with colored compact spiral fluorescents. The bulbs have an interesting shape and provide some mellow color without much power and heat. The light bars are an efficient alternative to an expensive collection of neon. I found racks of these bathroom fixtures for $5 at a Habitat for Humanity store.
Bathroom light bars for gameroom lighting.
I also tried some free–standing spotlight fixtures fitted with the same colored compact fluorescents. All of the various lights in the gameroom are plugged into a system of switched outlet circuits as noted below.
An illuminated stained glass Penn State logo. Click for more information on this piece.
A fake neon "OPEN" sign from Home Depot and a real "PINBALL" neon.
"Yuengling" neon.
"Michelob" and "Bud" neons.
Octopus floor lamp and gumball machine. But I'm not a gum person and haven't decided with what to fill it.
I thought about constructing a pub shelf around the gameroom's central column. Instead I simply ordered some teak drink holders from a boating supplier.
Here's an antique telephone I got from my father-in-law (who worked for Bell back in the day). I don't know anything about old phones, but it appears to be cobbled together from different parts. The wood box with the ringer is clearly not original. But it makes a cool gameroom fixture and it works!
Electrical...
The gameroom is powered from six outlet circuits. There are three 20 amp unswitched circuits for games and such. There are three 15 amp switched circuits for lamps and neon signs and the like. I settled on the convention of double boxes distributed along the walls at four foot intervals. The left-side white outlets are unswitched. The right-side ivory outlets are switched and correspond to a bank of three ivory switches near the room's entrance.
There's also a system of 2'x4' florescent ceiling fixtures when bright light is needed.
