My Untidy, Neverending Games Room Project

You may have noticed that every now and then I post a pic or two from my games room. This room is my haven, my Fortress of Solitude, and has come in especially handy while recovering from back surgery. The beauty of it is the fold out bed. It folds out in front of the many retro games consoles. For the last week I have spent many hours exploring Legend of Zelda The Wind Waker - a game that I once started over a decade ago and ended up giving up on. Nothing to do with the game, I just have a fun habit of starting epic games and not finishing them. 

But this post is about my games room, not The Wind Waker (although I'm strangely proud of how far I've gotten this time). I love my man cave, but it needs work. Space is limited, and the constant challenge is utilising it efficiently. Above the consoles stands a loft bed, giving potential for 4 people to sleep in the room.

I have so much stuff for the walls, but they are full to the max with awesomeness already. 

Some of my bead artwork is dotted around the walls, but a lot of it sits in boxes, taking up space in front of some of the consoles. My boxes of beads take up some room too, with the sorted colours in small boxes, and the spare colours in other cardboard boxes. Again, all taking up valuable space in my chillout zone.

My two glass display cabinets house many of my favourite collectibles. You'll see statues and models from Back To The Future, Ghostbusters, Batman and Ninja Turtles, to name but a few. The best thing about these cabinets? No dusting! And they provide a fairly efficient use of space to display my stuff. They're also pretty cheap in IKEA!

Currently they're situated in pretty much the only place they can go in this room - the corner. I have a full shelf unit of DVDs on another wall - maybe if I managed to get rid of these I could better display my treasures? Possibly... sounds like a lot of work though, and we still watch some of those DVDs. I know, we're old.

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One of my favourite parts of the room is the sprite wall. I saw a similar set up of Lemmings on someone's Instagram page and couldn't resist making my own. I poured so many hours into that game when I was younger! The other sprites are affixed to metallic boards from - you guessed it - IKEA! I wanted a way to display sprites in a way that they could be easily moved around without causing any damage to the surface they were attached to. Gluing magnets to the backs of the sprites makes this possible. And the NES black box art of Super Mario Bros and Duck Hunt came cheap at Camden Market. I think they look great framed!

And to the side of the loft bed, we have more artwork looking for a home. The Marvel covers canvas was a Christmas present that I have no space for currently. Add to this the A3 print of Sega Megadrive blueprints that came with my Kickstarter Megadrive book, and the signed poster for the Delorean restoration documentary that I'll be getting soon, and the framed Tron arcade marquee print that's sat around waiting for a home, and you start to see how much I desire more wall space! If only the wife would let me decorate the whole house with my awesome stuff...

And of course there's the ever-growing pile of Retro Gamer magazines. Even if I got binders for them, I have no idea where they'd go. I kind of like having them to hand to dip into every now and then, so I don't want to dump them in the loft.

So what's the answer? Get a new house would be the long term goal. But for now I'm going to look into renting a storage unit to store my artwork between shows and markets. This would free up some space immediately and make the room a little less cluttered. It would also restore access to half of my consoles. Now that they're hard to get at, I really want to play them of course! And with more weeks off work to come, what better time to sort it out!