When I first moved into my current house almost 7 years ago the gameroom got a relatively quick and not thought out coat of purple paint and games shoved in there.  Then I kinda ran with a memorabilia everywhere theme and filled every corner with ’stuff’ from my childhood.

I finally decide to really work on the theme and overall feel of the room instead of stuffing as many games as I can in there.  So now i’ve landed on a layout that is my ‘max’, which means I took a couple games out permanently to make the room feel more open and inviting to play.  Back in the day the Lake Square Mall in leesburg florida had an arcade called Gold Mine that I visited nearly daily when I was young and the arcades were the rage.  It was this particular memory that has made me always want to recreate that in the home arcade.  So, with no family in town for the holidays I finally decided to go ahead and do that retheme.  It was a TON of work!

The original Gold Mine arcades were themed after of all things, old gold mines  Complete with timber framing, fake rocks, fake bricks and lighting.  Generally the walls were a dark chocolate brown with the faux stone work in various places to create the illusion.   To do this in my gameroom, i used faux brick hardboard that has a really convincing brick look and texture with solid rough sawn cedar to create the timber framing look.  In the near future i’ll be converting some old hurricane lanterns to use flicker light bulbs to extend the theme a bit more and adding some uplighting to enhance the texture of the brick and timber.   Decoration wise, I backed pretty much down to posters and the like on the walls with many of my favorite toys from the old decorations put more in ways that you can pick them up and play with them instead of being tacked to the walls.

Anyway, here’s a couple of phase 1 pictures

Need to add a bartop table here.

Here's my attempt at creating the old mineshaft feel.

Much simpler look, just larger posters and such.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 25th, 2011 at 6:35 pm and is filed under My Collection. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.