Whoa, that was a TON of work but it is finally finished! I knew I had to get my gameroom in shape before my upcoming delivery of a brand new pin, but I don’t think I realized how much work would be involved in the process. Really old low pile carpet covered the floors and boring white paint adorned the walls, needless to say my gameroom wasn’t very inspiring.
My Old Basement Gameroom
One of the biggest issues was my gameroom didn’t feel like it had its own “identity”. The other side of the room housed my TV and console systems and with nothing separating the two sections the whole area felt like one huge mess. My wife and I decided that putting up a pony wall between the two sections would be the best way to give some separation while at the same time not closing in either of the spaces with a full height wall.
The pony wall is up.
I had a good friend come by and help me out with the pony wall construction. In actuality he put up the wall and about all I did to help was get materials and put up drywall. What can I say, I wanted to help but when you have a friend in construction its easier just to let him go at it and not get in the way!
Drywall installed.
See all of that brown carpet? All of that had to come up to make way for our new laminate flooring. Since this is a basement I couldn’t install hardwood. Carpet wasn’t an option as well so we opted for laminate flooring. We had no idea what we are getting ourselves into but we knew we had our work cut out for us. Our basement is not one huge box; we have a closet, a little tiny boxed in area in the corner of the room and the new pony wall that had to get flooring. Our first step was to remove the carpet and start laying down the underlayment.
Underlayment down and carpet removed.
See the closet with our A/C unit to the left in the picture above? That is one of the obstacles we had to plan for. Here is another one:
Since we were laying the laminate down on this side of the room first, this little area had to be done before anything else. We had to measure the depth of the laminate and it had to just meet the edge of the wall so that the long run of laminate would hook into this little corner. It seemed daunting at first but thanks to my wife’s careful planning and attention to detail we successfully navigated the first challenge.
Success!!
Those little black wedges you see in the picture above are spacers that were used to keep an expansion gap around the flooring. This is a floating floor so we had to leave at least a 1/4″ gap all the way around. We also had to make sure that our laminate would go under the door casings so that meant a lot of cutting with an undercut saw. Since the door casings would not be covered with quarter round we had to measure the planks to that they fit under perfectly. We had a transition piece that would go from the laminate to the exposed concrete floor in my workshop area so the laminate had to be just the right length.
Here is how we ran the laminate under the door casing
After getting it under the door casing we were able to run a lot more of the flooring until we got to our next obstacle, the closet doors. Here is our first attempt with the laminate:
The problem with laying it this way is our closet doors would not cover the laminate. We knew we would have to move the closet doors forward but after this first attempt we knew the doors wouldn’t cover the flooring. I also didn’t want to see the transition piece so we knew we had to backtrack and tackle this area again. I re-cut more laminate and did it again and this time ended up with satisfactory results:
Success!
Now the laminate is in the middle of the door casing. Once I installed the transition piece there would be a smooth transition with no view of the vinyl floor inside the closet. Now that we successfully navigated this obstacle we were ready for the next one, the new pony wall. We had to wrap the laminate around the column with the proper gap around the entire pony wall. After accomplishing what we thought was impossible previously we made short work and got it right the first try.
Let's just pretend you didn't see this...
The gap in the picture above is a bit bigger than we planned for but the quarter round would cover it with space to spare:
Gap? What gap! 
After getting past the pony wall the rest was pretty easy. The only remaining obstacle was the steps leading up and out of the basement. We removed the old, dingy carpet that was there and decided to install laminate on the stairs as well. The risers (the vertical piece of wood) was not in the best of shape so we cut new ones and installed on top of the old. Since we were doing every stair this was an appropriate installation method but before we could install the new risers we had to cut the treads (the horizontal piece of wood that you step on) even with the existing risers. This was an interesting task. The professionals take a circular saw and after marking the tread they proceed with a plunge cut to remove the excess tread material. Since the circular saw is my least favorite power tool I went with a messy but easier way.
I bought a 1.5″ straight router bit (with a bearing) and cut the wood away manually. There were two downsides to this method. First it was a lot of work, each tread had to be trimmed. The second but most important issue is all of the mess it would make! I didn’t think of that before I already started cutting and it left tons of wood dust under the stairs which got all over everything packed up down there. Oh well a small price to pay for safety from my arch enemy the circular saw.
The new risers installed.
The completed staircase from above. What a beauty!
Now we have a separate area for the arcade and the TV/MOVIE/Video Game recreation area. This is probably the most rewarding project we have accomplished. Not only did we do the installation ourselves, we also proved that we could handle a huge project with minimal mistakes. It makes the gameroom a place the entire family wants to be. I haven’t started putting up posters and pictures yet except for my Dragon’s Lair poster but that will be the next step in the evolution of our basement gameroom. Here are a few more shots of the finished area:
Here is how the closet doors came out, you can't see the transition between the laminate and the vinyl floor.
You can see all of the renovation pictures here at a much higher resolution: http://gallery.metahugh.com/main.php?g2_itemId=30725
