The Wreck Room
Have you ever wanted to be on Trading Spaces, or While You Were Out? Do you have tons of design advice but no space to design? Well it’s your lucky day… I have a room that I have no clue what to do to it, and I’m open to suggestions. Fire away - crazy or conservative. I need help with my Rec Room.
The problem is that I don’t know what I want to use the room for. We don’t have a use for a game room, or a second family room - we hardly watch TV anyway. It would be nice to have more space for guests, but it is a room that everyone passes through.
The rec room is a large room that is also the main walkway to many other rooms - on the bottom level of our house, it goes to the garage, the guest room/bathroom/laundry room, upstairs, and outside. Right now, I’m only using it for storage - it seems like a wasted space. We usually keep the door downstairs closed off, unless we go out the garage or are doing laundry.
I have tons of ideas for the room, but they are all long term. If I ever get a patio built out back, it would be neat to have the Rec room set up like a sun room. I imagine Mediterrainian tile floor with a small table/chairs and maybe a buffet. I’d put in French doors that lead out to the porch. Or someday, if I’m living in this house when I have kids, then our offices will be moved down there and the offices will become their bedrooms. But, I have a long time until then - I’m not even married yet.
There are a couple of quirks with the room to keep in mind. The ceiling is two levels. It’s about a foot shorter near the garage and staircase. Unfortunately, this height
changes right over the guest room door. There’s an alcove next to the garage where the previous owner removed a built-in cabinet. I think it would be a great place to add a coat or cedar closet.
So, any ideas?
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The Saturday News and Observer took a rec room very similar to yours and redesigned it. I even showed it to your dad as a possibility for you. I suspect he threw the paper away, but I’ll look around just in case it is still here.
That’s funny - great minds think alike. After checking out the link you sent me of the room, I realized it was the same room that I had bookmarked as inspiration. I saw it on the Divine Design - my fav HGTV show.
Here’s the HGTV site: http://www.hgtv.com/hgtv/dc_design_living_area/article/0,1793,HGTV_3376_4290469,00.html
And here’s the N&O site:
http://www.newsobserver.com/371/story/388297.html
I posted this on a room decorating site and one of my real life friends who reads it too saw it and reminded me that it would be a good place to display any collections I might have. And, I do have a collection of VW Bus stuff - posters, vintage ads, toys, models, etc - and I had not found a place for them in my house yet. I think that would be a good location for them.
That’s a room that screams to be a library and display area. (The display area I got from your own comment, but I was honestly going to say library. :) ) Put in bookcases (or - yeah, more projects, I know - build in some shelves of medium height rather than buying the pressboard ceiling-reachers) around the room. Leave walls book-free for display of posters. Rather than create a library that stores books but you otherwise don’t hang out in, put the books in a big showcase room that’s a walk-through space rather than a destination space. So, when you want a book, go there and get it and take it to the porch or the living room or wherever you read. It’ll also serve to show off to guests, and gives them a quiet place to borrow a book on their own.
Yes, it’s a huge room, and maybe you don’t have enough books to fill it. But we all end up with enough books eventually, right? The Boyf (my boyf) could fill that room with filled shelves and need more space besides.