The Final Basement Reveal: The Game Room
It's spring break week, which officially marks the one year anniversary from when our basement flooded while we were out of town last year. So we're THRILLED to be posting the last reveal from our reconstruction project - the game room! Plus scroll all the way down for quick links to the entire basement blog seres to see all we accomplished down here!
This funny little offshoot from the main living room has gone through a number of evolutions since we moved in. Always a playroom, but as the kids' play styles and tastes have evolved, this room has evolved with it! So my mom heart breaks a little now that we're calling this the game room and not the playroom. Swipe through for a quick look at how this room has changed in just three and a half quick years since we've lived here:
Finishing the Game Room
This room really didn't get any major upgrades or changes in our basement construction process. We removed one of the baseboard heaters (aka playroom fire hazards) and tucked away all of the old speaker wires into the wall to clean everything up, leaving just the TV on the wall.
Before the carpet went down, we left our mark and signed the floor. This was something we did in our old house when we finished the basement - kids thought it was pretty cool.
With the new carpet down, this room was ready for furnishing. Rather than trying to block this room off from the rest of the space like we had done before, we intentionally tried to better incorporate it into Zach's main man cave living space. He used to have built ins to display all his sports antiques and collectible in our old house, and missed that so we found a wall unit at IKEA that we could put around the TV, giving us some storage for toys and games and shelves for displaying all the sports things.
I love IKEA but hate that we don't have one locally so we were pleasantly surprised to find that IKEA had a local pick-up point that they would deliver to in our market for free without having to pay for shipping! We just had to pick it up from a distribution point in a neighboring suburb!
Once assembled, which took us both a few hours, Zach got right to work decorating.
The only other new "furniture" we bought for this space were three Big Joe bean bags. For video gaming around the TV, we thought that would give the kids a little seating but with major flexibility. Plus we were tired of spending big money down here so we were looking for something a little cheaper to get us started. The coolest part I think about the chairs were the boxes they came in! They know kids love a good cardboard box and came ready to be cut out to play in!
The New Game Room
As I mentioned, Zach wasted no time loading up the shelves with his treasures and collectibles.
The bean bags were as much of a hit as the boxes they came in and I can confidently say this is Hank's new favorite hangout.
We decked the walls with even more of Zach's collection that had been in storage. I helped him hang these in a way that we can keep adding on to the walls as he gets more. I think his new goal is to fill these walls up.
Since we lost quite a bit of our kids toy storage to water damage, we added a couple more cabinets for books and other misc nearby under Zach's scoreboard. This is a special scoreboard that came from the little league in his home town. My grandpa helped us rewire it 10 years ago when we finished the basement in our old house, so we were happy to be able to install some new electrical with this reno to get it operational again with a dedicated switch!
You may have already recognized the kitchen table made its way down here. This is the same set I painted a couple years ago. It was a cheap Marketplace find that has served us well, but ready for a new life in the basement as a game table. We added a tablecloth to help catch spills and a spinning basket to hold cards and other quick games.
With the wall down and new layout thanks to the TV over the fireplace, these spaces are now much better connected and give us a ton of space to host friends and family.
PHEW - that's it. Basement is officially done. Can't believe it's been a year already but are grateful to have this space totally back in action. But as they say... #housedonemandead. Moving on to new projects!
Need a game room fix? Here's what we used:
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Construction Updates
All the Reveals
