Pimp my Basement

I always enjoyed watching the TV show Cribs.  Voyeurism + blatant materialism + looking into people's fridges.  Loved it.  I didn't care who was featured.  It could be a basketball player, a country music star, a rap mogul...I loved them all.  With maybe the minor exception of the D list "star" who had the 2 bedroom condo.  I mean, their condo was just like any other 2 bedroom condo.  If I wanted to see a 2 bedroom condo, I'd watch House Hunters instead.

Of all of the houses featured on Cribs, I tended to like the basketball players' houses the most.  They had some awesome rec rooms.  Big ass TVs with video games, cushy theater seats, pool tables, ARCADES, full-service bars!   It was the perfect set-up.  I could live in that rec room.

We got a basement rec room with the house we bought.  It has about a 100 sq ft mini kitchen, which is frankly bigger than a lot of people's normal kitchens.  Then it has about 800-900 square feet of open rec room space.  There's also 2 big bedrooms, a big bathroom (about 100 sq ft), and a big storage closet down there.  The property assessor says the basement is 1,650 square feet.  The real estate appraiser says it's 1,800 square feet.   

Of course we know what to do with the mini kitchen, the 2 bedrooms & the bathroom.  But what do we do with the 800-900 square feet of open space?  It's L-shaped. The little part of the L is functionally next to the kitchen, so it's kind of a dining area.  We have our old dining set there now.  But that still leaves a whole lot of space that's not accounted for.

Needless to say, I want to pimp my basement.  Big LCD TV hung on the wall, sectional couch, a couple arcade games (ya know, the 80s stand-up type), pool table, ping pong, air hockey/foosball, change the carpet, maybe paint one or two walls kind of funky (I'm thinking of a burnt orange).  In my head, I'm really envisioning it all and the associated price tags.  I could probably do it all for $13,000, which is nothing when you compare it to the basketball players' rec rooms.  However, for our meager budget, it's a little (or a lot) over the top.  Even if we did have $13,000 laying around, it's probably preferable that we put that toward a new roof.  Because, after all, you can have a pimped out rec room, but if it's waterlogged from the leaky roof, you just lost that rec room.  Once the roof is done (estimated to be $30k), then we need to work on the master bathroom ($10k), the floor in Julia's bathroom ($1k), the upstairs and stairs carpet ($6k), refinishing the hardwood ($4k), getting a new built-in entertainment center for the family room ($8k), doing something with the deck ($3k), and blah blah blah.  So after ALL of that is done, then we can start planning the rec room.  Given the cost estimates of all that, we will probably get to the rec room in the year 2054.  By then we'll be in Craftmatics and blind.

Anyway, one thought is to do a little of it each year.  I'm thinking of a game table/billiards table as an initial purchase.  Husband is on board; he's a guy after all, and it doesn't take a whole of sweet talking to get him to agree to a pool table.  See, this is why he probably appreciates me as a wife.  I'm kinda cool like that.  Most girls would want to buy purses, shoes, jewelry.  I'm like, "Can we get a pool table?  And a Pacman stand-up arcade game?"  Then he can talk me down by saying that we already have Pacman (...on a video game console), but he is cool with a pool table. 

You should have seen me in 2007 when I was bugging him about getting him a Wii.  We got a Wii, and the picture quality just wasn't good enough...so I said, "Let's get a big ass TV." 

Mission: a pool/billiards/game table as the first purchase for Operation Pimp My Basement.