Well, been in my new home a little less than a year and finally able to begin finishing off my basement and building out my game room.

I'll give details and upload pics as things move along. Any and all suggestions are welcome and appreciated. Most of my ideas I got from reading thru this section of Pinside.

Game room area is 37x15 with a separate area built out for a skee ball alley and my Hyperspin cabinet. All of the square footage is usable for pins except for a crane game and Chexx hockey that I'm going to put in there somewhere.

Laying black/charcoal commercial carpeting and plan on painting the ceiling charcoal grey.

Not sure what to do with the lights. I'm putting recessed lighting over the skee ball, but not sure what to do in the main pin area. I like some light when playing pins, can't have it too dark. Was thinking about putting track lighting straight down the middle of the room (lengthwise) as the pins will be lined up along the walls. The tracks will essentially be directly above the players heads.

Again, any suggestions are appreciated.

(First pic is main pin area, 2nd pic is skee ball alley area under steps)

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There are double pocket doors at the far end. The double width is for convenience since the entry to the basement (from that white door behind it) is 3ft. The door leads to steps up to the garage. Makes it relatively easy to get pins in and out (which is why I put the double pocket doors down that end. I think I'm going to put a commercial aluminum storefront door with sidelight for the main entrance off the TV area of the basement.

I plan on fitting a row of pins along each wall with space between them in the middle.

Ya, I'm aware of that. I spent about 5 hours working on the floor plan on a flight from PHL to PHX a few months ago. I have to build some other rooms in the basement as well and this was the best option for the pins.

The more modern the pin the more play it seems to get when I have people over. I'm going to try to line them up so that the more popular games have a less popular game behind them.

Plumbing and electrical rough in start this week. Basically going to have a boatload of surge protected outlets low along both walls running back to a bank of switches by the main door.

After 2 years of anticipation this showed up today. Now I get to look at the box for 5 more weeks or so. I guess it's motivation to get the damn job done. :/

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I did go out into the garage just to stare at the box for a while.

Did ya give it a hug too. I do that with my Mustang too.

I hear ya. I took it to the Phillies game last night. We're spending some quality time together...

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Make sure that you have plenty of power for your games. I run a maximum of seven pinballs off of each twenty amp breaker with no problems. Each set of games is controlled by a wall switch.

Yes, actually only putting 4 games on a breaker just because I have the capacity. Keeping each set of games on its own switch in a small closet that actually outside the gameroom.

Also, taking my new best pal to the Eagles game on Thursday. Promised him a foam #1 finger if he's good.

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Great minds think alike.

Not putting neons in the gameroom, but I'm having a line run high in the wall the entire perimeter of the bar/TV room just for that purpose.

I think the bored graphic artist in my office is enjoying it more.

I got word that WoZ will soon be traveling on vacation...

I'm heading to London this weekend. Apparently WOZ went ahead.

Hope he's having fun and not running up my credit card with long distance calls to Jersey.

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Been traveling this week. Electric all roughed in and awaiting inspection. Took a quick pic of the one wall.

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Holy shit. Great catch.

Electrician and I had miscommunication. Bringing them to no more than 4 pins on one 20amp circuit.

Some of the plumbing getting roughed in today and Monday. Electrical should be wrapped up by tuesday. 149 outlets overall.

Need to decide on the track lighting for pin room. Any suggestions? I like a fair amount of light, also want to be energy efficient and look good

Sorry, 149 outlets in the entire basement are being finished off, not just in the pinball room.

Electrical inspection is today. Hopefully we get rolling again by end of week.

Drywall should go up quickly, but, being below grade, I have a feeling that the time needed to dry between spackling will be long. Well see.

Plumbing is all roughed in and ready to go. Bar sink and bottle cooler arrive this week. Ice maker already here.

Passed all 3 inspections this afternoon.

Sheetrockapalooza.

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Cleanup today. Tape and mud starts tomorrow.

Hoping to have just the pin room pained and carpeted in 2 weeks. Rest of basement will prolly drag on for a few weeks longer than that.

First coat.

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A lot completed since last update, but mostly behind the scenes.

But the storefront door and sidelight went up today. Glass will be installed in a couple days. Looking thru the door will pretty much let you look the length of the room between the rows of pins.

2nd pic is closet next to the main door where all the switches are for the pin room outlets and also where I'm going to store my pin parts and tools and whatnot.

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Thanks. Glass came in the wrong thickness for the door. :/

Here's the room mostly painted, track lighting installed, molding up around perimeter for LED lights.

Pins supposed to get moved back tomorrow and Friday.

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Oh, the carpet is installed too. Its covered by the drop cloths. It's commercial carpet, charcoal grey with white flecks. Ceiling is matching charcoal grey and walls are a lighter grey.

Got some pins moved in, WOZ finally uncrated, and bubble hockey moved in.

Rest of pins and skee ball today.

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Lots of work today. Should have everything in there tomorrow.

I can't get anything done because I have to play WOZ every 10 minutes.

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Ceiling height is 9ft except that one corner I had to box in.

I can fit 13 pins along the main wall and 10 along the other. I can get creative and fit a few more if needed.

There is an access panel behind the skee ball (with a dedicated work light) that's accessed thru a closet in the hall.

Here's a couple more pics including the skee ball work area. I'm putting LED rope lighting into that molding, that's what's stretched out on the floor in the one pic.

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I'm finishing off the entire basement. There is another room with bar, hi top tables, seating, TV, etc. Its the room on the other side of the storefront door.

It's not as far along as the arcade is. I'll take some pics when I take better pics of the arcade.

Thanks. Hopefully getting rope lights in place today, not sure if I'll have power to them for a couple more days. But need to get them up off the floor.

The main room is approx 20x40. The focal points are the bar at one end and big TV at the other. Making that room more like another floor of the house. There is no door leading down from the main floor of the house, just a staircase. Will be decorated approximately the same way. Stone around the bar and stone on the TV wall.

Plus there are other rooms (gym, kids playroom, etc) so I wanted the arcade to be it's own separate space so it could be painted and decorated exactly how I wanted it to be and not like the rest of the house.

I promised the board of directors that I would do my best not to let games encroach on the main area. But I'm already thinking how to get around that.

There is an access panel inside a hall closet that leads to the back of the skee ball area. There's a fair amount of room back there.

Had a hiccup today with the LED rope lighting. The LEDs only shine in one direction (duh) so the rope has to be placed with the same section facing up for the entire perimeter of the game room.

It's in place resting in the molding now, but going to have to turn it exactly right and put some silicone caulk to keep it facing the right way.

Here's pics of the TV wall and the bar in progress.

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So the basement is 99% complete and I had the camera out to take pics of my ToM I'm selling so I thought it'd be a good time for a final update with pics.

Can't express how pleased I am with the gameroom and the basement overall. I lot of time and effort but I'm really happy with the results.

Here is the storefront door leading to the game room. I'm getting it lettered at some point...
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Pics of pins and games...
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My electrical and pin parts closet with the anal retentive "wall o' keys."
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The main area of the basement. Down the hall are kids playroom, gym, storage, bathrooms, and P1000143.JPGP1000142.JPGP1000141.JPGP1000140.JPGP1000139.JPGP1000138.JPGunfinished storage.

I was an inexpensive job, but really a pain in the ass to install.

I ordered a 100ft roll of clear LED rope lights off eBay. SImilar to this: ebay.com link: 110V WHITE Clear LED Rope Light 100 ft Holiday Light

I unspooled it and let it sort of acclimate for a few days. The difficult part was that, since the LEDs only sine through one side, we had to hot glue it in place and you could really only do about 6in at a time.

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I'm very pleased with them.

I wanted LED lighting because of the energy savings and I didn't want lights that'd throw off heat. I was concerned that, in an enclosed space,with all the pins on, and with folks playing them, that a bunch of halogen lights would just make the space too warm.

Problem was that nice LED track lighting like I had in mind were like $180/head and I wanted about 25 or 30 heads so that just was too much to spend on lights.

I ended up get 5 nice 6 bulb halogen fixtures form Lowes for about $60/ea, then I replaced all bulbs with similar output LED bulbs for about $8/ea.

I have them on a dimmer and I generally play with them about 50% dimmed. You can play with just the molding lights and the machines on, but I like it a little brighter.

Because of code requirements I really had no choice other than to use cultured stone. Real stone would have required us to jackhammer up a big section of the concrete floor and repour it with rebar installed. Sorry, no way....

We used EP Henry cast veneer stone. I think what we put up was called "Mesa Verde" (spelling might be off.

The masons said it was good product to work with. They had to do a lot of cutting for the bar and especially for the columns. I wanted the columns stoned, but didn't want them to look like chimneys standing in the middle of the room. So there was a lot of fine tuning going on.

One other thing. My wife did a lot of work getting the bar top just right. I wanted to show a pic. There is a lot of dust but you can still see.

Its a thin sheet of copper that had a patina applied by a chemical process. We then covered it with epoxy so it will be protected and not change color any further.

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