The Plan

One night I was laying in bed with my wife reading a brewing recipe book.  She was watching Candice Olson's design show.  On the show Candace was renovating a basement, so I instantly refocused my attention.

I was particularly impressed by the way she would draw up sketches of the space, then fill them in with different colors to test out patterns or swatches.  Yes, swatches.

I looked around my side of the dresser and found some graph paper.  I ran downstairs and found some colored pencils.  I started sketching.

First, I started with the game room.  Nearly every bar or restaurant makes use of wainscotting, so I immediately sketched in three styles.  I added a drink rail and barstools for people watching exciting ping pong matches.  Originally I played with some variations of blue, which would look sharp against a black or darkly stained wood.

I sketched a few ideas on bars, but there were a lot of questions about the size & space needed.  More on that later.

Next, I worked on the entertainment center for the media room.  The inspiration came from some sleek consoles I'd seen at IKEA.  A professionally made console could easily run two to three thousand dollars, so I gave myself the challenge of trying to build one myself.  The bottom compartments would house all the wires, DVD's, Rock Band equipment, and other things that tended to get scattered on the floor.  I wanted to build in shelves that could hold vases, wine bottles, pictures, etc.  This entertainment center would span the entire north wall.

Having kids means that you're short on both time and money.  So as I'm envisioning this basement coming together, I'm jave no delusions that it will happen quickly.  I'm under the assumption that this whole project could take anywhere from 1-2 years, based upon where it falls in the whole scheme of things that need to get down to our house.  I needed to break it down into sections.  So here it is, my grand plan:

1. Game Room.  Paint the walls, install wainscotting, drink rail, new trim, and doorways.
2. Build the bar in the game room.
3. Theatre room: build the entertainment center, mount the tv, paint the walls.
4. Final touches: new carpet, new furniture, new lighting.

I got excited for my plan and drew up a little MS Paint diagram.  Here's how the whole thing looks from above.

Blank Canvas

The only picture from our old basement of beer gone wild

In November of 2005, we stumbled upon a house that had been vacant for over a year.  Initially, we were looking for a house in the Forest Hills district closer to my daughter's school, but we were also outgrowing our first house.  Our old basement was so full of baby clothes, baby strollers, baby toys, and baby paraphernalia that there was no longer room to play ping pong on the table I'd bought a few years earlier.  So when we toured through this vacant house that had a huge yard (a potential garden for my wife) and a huge basement with tons of storage, I knew I was hooked.

We moved in during Christmas of 2005, and I snapped a few of these pictures of this blank canvas of a basement.


The north half of the basement.  Because of the square nature of the room, I picked this side to be the Home Theatre/Media Room.



The back end of the Media Room.  The Stairwell divides the space in half.



The South Room.   It's more rectangular in shape, which I thought would accommodate the ping pong table.  Now known as the Game Room/Bar Room.

The walls in this room were a very strange textured drywall that locked in together against 2x4 studs.  It's as if drywall came with a wallpaper finish on one side.  I had no idea what was behind the walls -- was it cement brick, poured concrete, insulation?  The carpet was grey and had multiple stains that I couldn't get out with a steam cleaner.  The drop ceiling was white, and whoever installed it didn't recess the lights in metal brackets for proper support of their weight.  They simply cut holes in the tiles and dropped them in.  Some of the tiles had a visible sag from the weight of the lights pulling them down.  Basically, I was happy that the basement was partially finished, but I knew I had a lot of work to do in the long run.

The house needed some desperate attention to the exterior roof and interior decorating where we'd be spending most of time.  I figured it would be about 3 years before I could really start focusing on the basement.  In the meantime, I set up the TV in one room and the ping pong table & kegerator in the other.

Phillips 50" Plasma with JBL speakers in 5.1 surround

Old couches and a treadmill face the TV

I envisioned this nook as being a potential spot for a future bar.

The Game Room looking into a small closet where I housed the kegerator.

The ambilight feature on my Phillips plasma HDTV taken with a shutter delay

First post!

Ever since I got married and bought a house with a real basement, I've envisioned a "man cave" in the basement, some place I could retreat with friends and hang out.  A lot of the need for this came from nostalgia from the great times we had in the basement of my buddy Angus back in high school.  His basement was far from finished -- it had a ping pong table that we would set on top of an old pool table.  The basement was cold, the floor was often covered in cat pee, and you had to step over dirty laundry to get to it.  But you could show up at almost any time of night and find at least one of your friends down there laughing, playing games, and having the time of their lives.

It's been almost 20 years since we first found our way to that basement.  Our get togethers are limited to once or twice a year, but when we do congregate, we still like to disappear into the basement for a few days to recharge and feel like careless teenagers again.

This basement has become an obsession as of late, if only because my attempts at creating it were spoiled by mother nature.  So I thought it would be interesting to document some of the trials and tribulations and gallons of sweat I've put in to this dream.   Hope you enjoy.