Barry's Basement Man Cave

[q20v]

Hey guys,

For the past several years I've been juggling many of life's interesting challenges and at the same time trying to squeeze in fun projects here and there. Prior to marriage/kids (~2010) I finished the garage (see sig) and in 2012 I started poking away at the unfinished basement. About that time we had our first baby and basement progress slowed down. By the time our second baby arrived I had pretty much stopped progress, knowing I'd pick it up when they were older.

Long story short, this past year I finally re-started on the basement.

The layout of the basement is perfect for our family, the stairs divide it almost perfectly in two. My side is a storage room (and furnace room) and man cave, and the other side is a living area for the kids and craft area for my wife.

Today is the first day that the man cave really feels like it has a solid foundation for all the other little additions that I'll work on this winter.

My garage is well suited for dirty work (metal work, automotive, etc), for the basement I wanted something cleaner, a place where I can build plastic models, electronic work, CAD on my computer, read car books, etc. The winters leading up to now have been depressing for me, being in Canada it's not feasible to work in the garage because of the cold weather. I'm starting to realize I'm the type of person who needs to stay technically busy, if that makes any sense.. I'm not a TV person, so in the winter I typically go nuts. Not anymore!

Basic floor plan:

Drywall up, workbench roughed in, this was Feb 2015 and had been like this for a while.

At this point (summer 2015), the wife and kids took a 2 week trip out of town to my in-laws, and the plan was to finish the kids/wife side while they were gone. That mostly happened, but it also seriously put the brakes on my side because it became the new storage room:

You can see the entrance to the man cave here. I could barely get in

I'd get my payback, though. Winter of 2015/16 the wife gave the green light to use the newly finished kids area as storage, so I cleaned out the man cave in preparation for final mudding of the drywall and paint.

More to come..

 

[q20v]

I attempted to finish the mudding but progress was very slow. I called an expert and he finished the job in 2 days and made it look like a living room.

Once the mudding was done, I:
- Painted the walls
- Painted the floor
- Baseboards and door trim
- Finished the trim/detail on the work bench
- Leftover garage racedeck under the bench
- Moved in a few items relevant to the man cave. Other items slowly went into the furnace/storage room.
- Installed the computer and stereo
- etc etc

I surprisingly have no progress pictures of all of that work. And unfortunately I need to take off right now, but I'll continue this tomorrow.

Thanks for looking,

Barry

 

[q20v]

I've been moving the big items around trying to find the best layout, and I think this one is the best (for now..). I had the big door/work surface right in the middle (90* to it's current position) but it made the room feel crowded. I also had the tool box turned 90* facing the main workbench, and the tall shelf behind it, but again it made the room feel small (which it is, so anything to help make it feel big helps!).

Now that it's fairly clean and organized, I can start going through some of my old boxes one by one and begin the sorting operation.

Plans for this winter:
- Book shelves for my.. books
- Wall mounted cabinet (maybe) on the left side of the workbench
- Clean the area around the press. Most of those boxes are old car parts I can likely get rid of.
- Hang tools on the wall above the workbench (considering pegboard).
- Try and get some trim to finish the race deck edge.
- Hang some more wall art.
- Paint the door to the storage room (hard to believe I haven't done this yet).
- Paint the bottom of the door work surface grey.

More pics coming..

 

[q20v]

The computer tower under the workbench is not the one running the monitor, it's a tower for the wife that I need to get running. The tower I use is in the storage room behind the workbench, and I run the wires through the wall.

I made a little cutout for the wires to pass through. The piece of wood is removable, you can kind of see the line in this picture.

Racedeck edge that needs finishing. I ran out of spares from the garage floor.

 

[q20v]

The past couple of weeks have been very productive for cleaning, purging, and getting things put away. I have a number of other fun projects ready to start but not until everything else is sorted out.

My dad had an Ikea shelf he wasn't using and it happened to fit perfectly above the computer work bench. I finally pulled out some of my useful text books and filled the gap with some die cast cars.

I went through 5-6 boxes of old stuff and reduced them down to 1 or 2. These were crowded around the press. My dad collects old computer cables and it seems I collect fasteners, even rusty and stripped ones. Handfuls of these off to the recycler, along with a big pile of old worthless car parts. At the same time I rotated the press to back against the other wall making better use of that corner. I used to have 3 plastic storage bins with drawers but I managed to declutter one of them meaning it went in the garbage.

I intend to rebuild the diff from the old BMW soon (bearings and seals) and I'll need access to the press, so that little project has really motivated me to clean the area. Again, I used leftover race deck under the press for aesthetics and to somewhat protect the floor.

 

[q20v]

Another area I've been tackling is the utility room which happens to be attached to the man cave. This little room contains the utility sink, furnace, water heater, freezer, electrical panel, and all our general storage. I built a good amount of shelving for rubbermaid containers and used an old counter top as a work surface beside the sink. I also had a sheet of pegboard kicking around (probably for 5 years) and found that I had a package of hooks... which to my surprise also contained spacers to install the pegboard. I finally installed the pegboard, another 3 old Ikea shelves from my dad, and some small storage bins on the wall beside the sink.

I find that the utility room has been in a constant state of flux, I'm always moving things around and sorting through boxes, but I think it's finally starting to come together. Purge purge purge I keep telling myself. If I haven't used it in 5-10 years, I probably don't need it anymore. I find that having a small storage space helps to control the desire to collect and hoard.

 

[Sunbimmer]

I commented in your garage thread too, great job on both

 

[q20v]

Many thanks again! A lot of work invested in both spaces between kids, wife, job, etc but it's starting to finally come together. And then the other day my wife said she wanted to move to bigger property


We're in a townhouse and the house itself is plenty big but she's used to the county and wants more property. I do too but we'd have to buy something cheaper than our current place, so further out of town and likely a compromise on the age / quality of house. I'm pushing to stay here for a few more years at least, so that the financial impact of the kids (wife is stay at home mom) and recent unexpected medical bills have been absorbed. Plus, mentally I don't think I could handle the logistics of a move right now. I need a few years of model building and cleaning the underside of my old BMW or something along those lines to help me decompress. Anyway, I digress. Tomorrow I'll post some updated pics of the garage. Not much new but pics are always good.

 

[sean Buick 76]

Great job on the basement I am impressed!

 

[q20v]

Hah I forgot about this thread, thanks Sean!

No updates in the basement right now. Things look mostly the same, but I do have plans for the near future. I want to re-purpose the basement work area to accommodate some composite work I want to learn and 3D printing. More on that later, though.