Ever since my wife and I bought our house, I've been patiently waiting to fix up the gameroom as we worked through the rest of the rooms. After months of electrical work, scraping, mudding, painting, and arranging the rest of the house, I finally got to the game room!

The room started off as a mess. It had been a 6 year old's bedroom while the previous owners lived here. One wall (the wall that is now the big wall o' games) was covered with corkboard which, when removed, took a good deal of the drywall paper with it. Thus, I did the logical thing and covered the entire wall with sheet metal. While I was at it, I decided to sheet metal half of another wall as well. Looks pretty sweet with the 50's retro table and chairs!

After sheet metalling, it was time to tackle the game shelving. I decided to be difficult on myself and make them all from scratch. I came up with the idea of using threaded rods as the supports, and then using nuts and washers to hold up the shelves. I imagine I'm not the first to come up with the idea, but hey, I was still excited about my brainstorm, so a few AutoCAD drawings later, I headed to Home Depot and had them cut some 3/4" MDF into 8' by 16" strips for me. It took some convincing on my part, since apparently cutting a sheet of MDF into thirds is "precision cutting", and Home Depot won't do that for you. After explaining that full sheets wouldn't fit in my car, however, the guy grudgingly decided to help me and cut up a few sheets for me. It took a whole 5 minutes after 10 minutes of arguing. After all the "help" I got at Home Depot, I went to the local hardware store to buy the threaded rod, nuts, and washers.

$200, some wordworking, and some elbow grease later I was all ready to assemble the shelving! This was a real pain in the arse, as once the bottom two shelves are on and the unit is stood up, it takes a really long time to spin the nuts all the way down the rods to put the rest of the shelves on. Also, a little advice if you ever do this yourself; always drill the holes in the shelves slightly bigger than whatever size rod you're using. Trust me, a 5/8" hole does not slide down 6' of 5/8" threaded rod very easily. If I had made the holes 3/4", my job would have been a heck of a lot easier!

However, all the work paid off. The shelves adjust to the exact heights I need them, so all I had to do was sort my games by size, make some minor adjustments to the shelves, and I was all set to fill 'em up! And fill them up I did.

Now I just had to move in my sweet vintage looking table and chairs, hang a few things on the walls (including my Carcassonne art) and the game room was complete. All ready for gaming!

I still have some minor paint touch ups and trim work to do, but here are the results!








*figures, the last picture with the least in it doesn't want to show up at normal size! It's mainly to show the Carcassone scenes, which a few people have asked me about.

Nice job on the shelving. I had made threaded rod shelves in the past and yeah, I found them to be a pain to assemble. But they served their purpose at the time. Personally I found that the exposed threads will wear away at whatever is near them because it is usually hard to keep things neat and accidents can happen. My solution was to go back to the store to pick up some clear vinyl tubing about the same inner diameter as the threaded rod. I cut the tube to length and then split it so it could be wrapped around the exposed threads. Then, no more worries about accidental damage!

Sweet!

That is a pretty sweet period table and chairs. I have so many fond memories of playing Go Fish! with granny at just such a table.

Looking good! I'm in the process of redesigning my gaming room/computer/library/home office. I'm hoping to have it more aligned for board gaming before the end of the month (super long gaming weekend with 9 people), so this is an inspiration for me. My big perk in my room is a full-sized (4'x8') white board that someone tossed out at work. Not only is it fully functional, it's magnetic! This has been useful for computer gaming weekends, and I suspect that it will be even more useful for a boardgaming weekend (I'm thinking that I could set up a magnetic game of something that takes an absurd amount of time, has next to no player interaction and folks can walk by and take their turns - like Empire Builder or another crayon rails game).

Enjoy your new gaming room!

Yup, I had the exact same idea with the vinyl tubing! But since I kept the shelves so tightly packed, the end games rest against the nuts, keeping them spaced a little ways away from the threaded rod. I'll probably eventually do the tubing thing just in case, though.

Now I have a place to stay one day when I am taking a cross-country trip accross the USA.

Enjoy....cool room....

I am going to have to wait until 5 kids are grown up and moved out of the house before I can try something like that. But it sure looks great!

Very sweet. Too bad there's no room left on that shelf for a Formula De league trophy!

I just drooled on my keyboard.

Cool! Those are nice shelves.

Nice to see SR in the center of the table. I just got my copy in the other day along with Lightning Reaction!

Also, can you post close ups of the carcassonne framed works?

A thing of beauty!