I want to share a quick story for all of you that are trying to justify setting up a dedicated game room in your home and perhaps offer a new angle for you to run it by your "management".

Like many of you, I started off with my games in a corner of one room, then moved them to other rooms as the collection grew and then finally reached a point where they wouldn't fit in the same space and began to scatter around the home. The discussion of putting them all in the same space came up and last year was the time to finally tackle this project.

Our home is blessed with 2x attached 2 car garages. The outer most of the garages contained the workshop and wood supplies from my grandfather who built this place and during the pandemic, we finally tackeled getting all of the garages (and basement) sorted and cleaned up. This made the closest of the two garages available for game room consideration.

Last winter, we started work on this in earnest and got the electrical completed, the doors sealed up as best possible, and then the supply constraints almost through a wrench in getting the heating/cooling solution as what we had ordered kept getting pushed back further and further. We made a switch to a different model and by the end of year, started moving games out into it.

Last weekend, I spent the majority of the time finally getting the game lighting in (yes, it would've been better to do that BEFORE the games went in; but, I wanted to make sure the LED channeling would stay stuck to the concrete block).

Little did we know that this project would literaly serve us as a life boat and become our environmental panic room this week when the temperatures neared 100 and our AC to the house went out. After some comedy in poor troubleshooting from the heating/cooling service (they said the house wiring was bad because they forgot to disconnect their heat pump when they were testing initally for a short), we had to either go to a hotel or use plan A(rcade).

The game room's mini-split was literally a life saver as my wife is disabled with respiratory and immune issues and heat and humidity are things that normally put her in the hospital.

So, we set up camp in the arcade for the last 3 days. Not so bad and my wife said repeatedly how happy she was we did this.

The only problem we had was the new game room is already full and while the walkways are big enough to easily service the games, they were too narrow for our air beds.

I guess that may mean I need to begin thinking about expanding the game room...