Wisconsin Pinball

epthegeek wrote:I put dricore floor tiles under the flooring in my basement. The whole thing. Adds a water barrier for the carpet, helps a LITTLE with temperature. Picked it up from menards and put it in myself.

http://dricore.com/nw/subfloor_about.php

Man your floor felt really nice as well. Low pile and nice as you walked around.

Only issue I would see is the noise of the concrete floor. Just more noise bouncing around. My game room gets way to loud as it is.

Maybe all those arcades don't make as much noise

Here's what I did when I converted my basement back room storage space into a game room. Water proofed the concrete block walls with the roll on stuff from Menards - cheap. Painted... took a gallon or 2 - cheap. Put up paneling on the interior walls - cheap. Dropped ceiling - cheap. The most expensive part was the flooring - I do not remember the price. I went with commercial grade carpet - no pad - glued to the floor... installed by professionals (local carpet store guys). The carpet looks great, helps with sound and is warmer on the feet. It is holding up really well after many years. If machines are moved around, the foot imprint disappears in short order too. I do use Pinfooties. Pins on my cart are easy to move around without the pad as well. After time... painted floors, wood, epoxy, etc will all scratch if you drag games around.

Snapped a couple pics of the basement the other night. Currently it's a giant mess, as we've just been throwing stuff down there and finally getting moved in/unpacked. I did have a painter come out to give a quote on spraying the whole ceiling flat black. He said $650, which seemed more than fair. We're probably going forward with that soon, I just have to removed a lot of excess phone and cable wire.

I'm also thinking of keeping the florescent light fixtures and tossing black lights in them. Then, adding some can lights around the room for "general" lighting. I'll have to replace the main and sub panel with a larger panel, but already talked with an electrician and we should be fine doing that and not upping the service to the house. Going with a larger panel should give enough extra spots for new breakers. After the power is done we'll build the new walls (around the furnace and the wife's drum room), paint the walls and find somewhere to get blacklight carpet tiles; and it's done! Hopefully shooting for April/early May.

If anyone knows of a site to order blacklight tiles, let me know. I'm fairly sure that's the direction I want to go. I'm also planning on doing the perimeter in normal black tiles; since games will be on them anyway; then blacklight in the middle. Hopefully that'll save a tiny bit of cost.

Making good progress

jasonm wrote:Snapped a couple pics of the basement the other night. Currently it's a giant mess, as we've just been throwing stuff down there and finally getting moved in/unpacked. I did have a painter come out to give a quote on spraying the whole ceiling flat black. He said $650, which seemed more than fair. We're probably going forward with that soon, I just have to removed a lot of excess phone and cable wire.

I'm also thinking of keeping the florescent light fixtures and tossing black lights in them. Then, adding some can lights around the room for "general" lighting. I'll have to replace the main and sub panel with a larger panel, but already talked with an electrician and we should be fine doing that and not upping the service to the house. Going with a larger panel should give enough extra spots for new breakers. After the power is done we'll build the new walls (around the furnace and the wife's drum room), paint the walls and find somewhere to get blacklight carpet tiles; and it's done! Hopefully shooting for April/early May.

If anyone knows of a site to order blacklight tiles, let me know. I'm fairly sure that's the direction I want to go. I'm also planning on doing the perimeter in normal black tiles; since games will be on them anyway; then blacklight in the middle. Hopefully that'll save a tiny bit of cost.

Nice stuff J. You going to have room for all your machines?

ChrisS wrote: Nice stuff J. You going to have room for all your machines?

Hopefully! It's at least as big, if not a bit bigger, than what I had at the last house, so it should be good. Guess I'll see once I bring everything home in spring, lol. This basement is at least flat and normal cinder block walls, so it'll make setup easier as well.

You going to put up drywall walls or just spray paint the block wall? If you spray the walls black you should do the same for the conduit.

ChrisS wrote:You going to put up drywall walls or just spray paint the block wall? If you spray the walls black you should do the same for the conduit.

I'll drywall with the new walls I'm building around the furnace and Cortney's drum room. The majority of the room will be left as the block, I'm going to paint it with drylok and then color over that.