Consolidating space in gamerooms?

[chadtower]

My gaming area has limited space... and I'm looking for ways to consolidate yet still have all my games available there. I'd like to hear what others did to solve these issues. I get the feeling I have thought of most things but not by any means all of them...

[jonjandran]

My gaming area has limited space... and I'm looking for ways to consolidate yet still have all my games available there. I'd like to hear what others did to solve these issues. I get the feeling I have thought of most things but not by any means all of them...

Give them away to members of the DP forums , of course. :D And we would send them back to you and let you Borrow them when you want to play. :D
But seriously if you could get your hands on that shrinking and expanding ray from Honey I Shrunk The Kids, then your problem would be solved. LOL

[chadtower]

I'm seriously considering going the mod way with some of my stuff... like the Saturn collection, which is getting really big. Maybe just making copies of my games and keeping them on a spindle next to the saturn, that way I don't have to worry about condition of the CDs at all.

[christianscott27]

dont collect/display boxes- if i kept all my games boxed i'd need double the shelf space. i have all my boxes stored in my cellar, i use them for tradebait. the size of say a boxed 2600 game is 4x the mass of a loose one.

consolidate systems- use a 7800 instead of 2600 and a 7800, ps2 instead of ps1, power base instead of sms and so on. if you can go for the smaller systems such as the baby snes, toploader or intv2. keep controllers and perphs stored until in use.

go vertical- my shelves climb 8+ feet up the walls, use wall mountable cassette (sms, gen, 32x, astrocade) CD (tg16, dc, ps1 etc) DVD (modern) racks to make room. be creative, my playchoice 10 sits a top a base made of wooden cassette racks holding 300 carts.

[Duncan]

After my brother unceremoniously dropped off his N64 and NES stuff with me, I'm at a loss for places to put it.

A friend at work did offer to "store" the items for me, of course. Ha-ha. :)

Duncan :D

[Phosphor Dot Fossils]

Drawers, drawers, and more drawers. Drawer units can hold up your gear and contain your games. Look into some inexpensive dresser drawer-type units, at Wal-Mart or somesuch.

[rbudrick]

There's ALWAYS more room for more shelves. Also, you don't really NEED you closet for clothes, do you? That's what your dresser is for. This goes the other way around too. I managed to keep all my clothes in another room noone uses, and I use both my dresser and my closet for space for games. I only use one drawer, the smallest one, for socks and underwear and stuff.

Raise your bed (I hollowed out 6 inches of four 18" 4x4s to accomodate the leg posts of my bed). This gives you more room to store stuff. Keep raising it...:-) I hear some places actually sell bed raising kits, but I like mine better. Continue to raise other things of interest that take up space.

Use the space underneath your dresser...c'mon, you know that lower board lifts up! Same goes with your lower desk drawers.

Most importantly, it's important to think vertically. Think about how much space your NOT using rather than what space you only think you have (say, like floor space).

You can build just one more shelf on to your entertainment stand, right? How 'bout another? on top of that too?!

You can always hang stuff from the ceiling too. I'm serious. ;)

-Rob

[chadtower]

Drawers, drawers, and more drawers. Drawer units can hold up your gear and contain your games. Look into some inexpensive dresser drawer-type units, at Wal-Mart or somesuch.

That's exactly what I have now. The area is just unfinished basement concrete walls, so I have Iris style dressers with all of my systems/games in them. I think, though, that I'm going to have to limit what I have in that area to only what I will play and keep everything else (extras, stuff I don't play much if at all) to another area.

[ubersaurus]

Welcome to my world!

Well for one, I have a number of shelves, holding damn near all of my games. Controllers and leftover NES games can be found in several drawers. Of course, the major problem is room for the consoles.

To solve this problem you need to find shortcuts. Stacking system's work (the PS2 and original NES are both good for being chairs, as does the demonic Vis). For sega needs, I've got a CDX with a power base convertor, so I didn't need to leave out my SMS, and that's sitting on top of a colecovision (where it fits almost TOO well...). In front of that is the Intellivision, and on shelves next to those are the top loader NES and atari 7800. I've got an odyssey 2 sitting on top of the TV itself. That's TV 1 though-TV2 has ashelving unit with a gamecube, dreamcast, N64, and saturn sitting on it (DC and GC on top of the aforementioned Vis), a PS2 with a modded PS1 sitting on top of that, on top of the TV, and a neo geo sitting on the desk next to the TV(which generally has controllers and the ilk on top of it). As for the Xbox and Super NES, those sit in the basement, along with most of my 2600 carts. My 5200, SMS, and spare systems are for the most part either in my closet, under the chair in my room, or in the basement on a shelf.

Someday I'd love to be able to make a game room proper, but for the time being, this isn't too bad. Pain in the ass to get people over to play though-this room is pretty cramped.

[chadtower]

I'll have to take pics of my game area. It's actually more of a corner since my basement is one big open area with the stairs in the center. The game area is in a corner of my (weight) training area, since that's where there was already a multimedia (tv, vcr, dvd, network, directv, stereo) center. Walk too far back, though, and you'll end up in the weight bench or the squat cage. A bit to the right is the treadmill...