I just discovered this, and want to give you a hearty "&^%# you" for destroying my happiness with my kitchen table as a game room. This is absolutely amazing, congrats, kudos, and may you enjoy the absolute heck out of it. Looks like a ton of work and even more money, and its super impressive.
Check out the blog of unceasing fun, defiantworkshop.blogspot.com!
Thank you very much - I appreciate all your superlatively kind words.
I will also respond to this with mucho back slapping. This is my dream to be able to have a space that I can have my gaming table, miniatures and gigantic He-Man collection displayed in. This is just brilliant. I'll be watching this thread closely! Love your woodwork btw!
There is no time for peace... Only...eternal...WAR...
I just stumbled on this thread, but your game room work is an inspiration to us all!
So, it’s been quite a long time since my last post about my game room, but rest assured, I have been making slow, steady progress since then. Having finished all the other ground-level cabinetry and shelving, the obvious last step for the north wall was those on the bottom-left of the wall, highlighted here:
I had stayed true to my original design above up until now, but I needed to make a change. I decided that I would replace the lower-left cabinets with a set of comic-book drawers.
The first thing I did was create the inside box of each drawer. I used much cheaper pine wood in lieu of oak since they’d spend most of their time hidden away. I used a router to create a groove along one edge of the boards:
Then I cut the boards and, using my Kreg-jig, wrapped them around a plywood bottom which free-floated in the groove I had routed into the boards. I made the drawer backs tall to hold up the comic books, but I left the fronts short since they would eventually be covered with a full-height oak drawer front:
Next I made the box to hold the drawers. At the same time I made the cabinet that would be tucked into the corner of the room using the same techniques I used with my previous cabinets:
It turns out my walls are not perfectly perpendicular. When I combined that with my imperfect woodworking skills, the result was that my new corner cabinet didn’t fit perfectly with my comic book drawers:
My imperfect solution was to jam some wood into the gap (fig. 1 & fig. 2) and fill the rest with wood-filler (fig. 3). It’s not very professional of me, but once it was stained (fig. 4) and finished it actually isn’t that noticeable:
Now it was time to put in my drawers. I would eventually have shelves on the countertop shown above that will hold my “nice” comic books…things like trade paperbacks, large-format hardbacks, special editions, etc. These drawers however are for holding my reading comics. These are mostly from my youth including single-issue runs of 1980s avengers, G.I. Joe, 1990s Spiderman, and Image comics (among others). I was basically trying to create fancier versions of those white cardboard boxes they use at comic book stores:
Once I had organized all my books into the drawers I slid them into the box I had built:
I used the new corner cabinet to hold gaming components that aren’t as pretty to look at and therefore don’t belong on the shelf – things like tackle-boxes of miniatures and roll-up game maps. The smaller drawers to the right of my comics would hold smaller gaming components like dice and small card games.
…and with that I had finished all of the ground-level cabinetry on my north wall. All that was left was building the shelves that would go on top. I’ll leave that for another post.
In my last post I finished the ground-level cabinetry and drawers for the north wall. All that was left was the book shelves that would sit on the counter tops (highlighted above).
First, in the northwest corner, I built shelves to hold my fancier display-quality comic books:
I built them using the same techniques I used previously on my board game shelves. As far as organization, I went with alphabetical by author’s last name from upper-left to lower right, and I put larger format books on their side on the bottom.
With my new fancy reading chair, this made a pretty cool comic-reading corner. I have spent many long autumn afternoons enjoying it:
Next I built the shelves in the northeast corner:
From the top shelf down, these shelves hold: source books for RPGs I no longer play, large-format nonfiction books (mostly military reference from my youth), source books for RPGs I currently play, and finally an entire shelf devoted to Warhammer 40K including my White Dwarf collection, rule books, and codexes.
Having the entire north wall finished has been a very satisfying accomplishment for me, for many reasons including being able to see what the entire game room might look like someday:
My next step on this project will be starting the west wall (the left side of the above picture). After that I hope to make the cabinet doors and drawer fronts to close up all those open storage spaces.
In the meantime, here’s another angle of the room for you:
That is some quality work there.
However the process of robo-insemination is far too complex for the human mind!
A knee high fence, my one weakness
Thank you, sir.