When we first moved into this house, we put a ton of effort into creating a home theater downstairs. We ripped out a yucky acoustic tile dropped ceiling and hard-wired a surround sound system in under a smooth drywall ceiling. We put in dimmable LED pot lights, and I chose a dark color for the walls ("Borscht"). We used the best, modestly-priced 2015 technology to run power cables and component connections through the walls to the TV. It took a few months to do everything we wanted, but for a while, it was a great hangout space. Then The Upheaval happened, and I tried to keep going down there while I was alone, but eventually I stopped. When the Mr moved back in, under what we thought was a temporary arrangement, we sort of kept using it as a theater-slash-family room, bingeing on TV shows and avoiding the temperature swings that are more common upstairs. But my health had taken a turn during his absence, and eventually the stairs became too much for me. I bought a TV for upstairs, and that became my primary video entertainment. I went through lupus flares, surgery recovery, and the fatigue that came with cancer (before and after diagnosis), and eventually I just watched TV from my bed rather than going down to the purpose-built room. Over time, too much furniture was stuffed into that space, and moving boxes were opened and never completely emptied, then left abandoned around the room. The cat box room was just down the hall from it, and a layer of the finest powder that cat litter could create touched every surface. The room was unloved.
Before we ever started playing D&D for real, we had thrown out the idea of offering that room for gaming to our kids. They lived in a tiny condo, and had a geeky sort of peer group (I say with fondness and motherly approval), and it seemed like a good way to get to see them. No one took us up on it at the time, and it became one of those great ideas that never survives the initial comment phase. When neighbor T came along two years later with his D&D starter kit and grand ideas of learning the game, we bounced around a lot. Sometimes we played here, sometimes at his house, and at least once at a specialty themed game parlor where they allowed groups to run games while they sold us overpriced beer and mead. As my treatment demanded it, we eventually started playing here all the time, so I didn't have to be sick in anyone else's bathroom. That's great for keeping me from getting overtired, but it wasn't great for keeping seven or eight people from massively overheating in my very small dining room.
If I had had the brain power and physical ability two months ago, before the heat of summer set in, I would have cleared out the basement sooner, and moved the games down there then. But until the last week, I could barely climb stairs once. Today, I was up and down them a half dozen times or more. (Slowly, to be sure.) My daughter came over, and together we dismantled the cat tower that no one uses anymore (she has an eight month old kitten who needs it more than my guys), and we moved a ton of furniture around. We vacuumed and sorted out a handful of recyclables, donation items, and trash, and found a few pieces of furniture that can go away forever. We tried multiple configurations of the room, never settling on the right layout, not once. Lucky for me, she tells me she is a manly man, so she did all the moving. Me, I took a lot of sit down breaks, and pretended I had the focus to sort stacks of papers. By the end of the night, we were both tired and sore, but the room was much cleaner and ready for the next phase of its development.
I'm going to build a big table downstairs, one that we can fit all of our players around. There's some scrap plywood in the back yard, and I can sand and paint it, and put legs on it. I need to work on designs, but I'd also like to put a rail around all the edges, where players can roll their dice and keep their drinks. We've talked about ripping out the carpet, that's now stained from spilled coffee and cat barf, and putting in as much of the bamboo planks from the condo that flooded in July as we can salvage. (Some will be too warped to use.) We need to do a bit of electronic work to get it prepped for D&D. We will work on connecting the TV to a computer or two, so that maps and symbols we need to know about can be broadcast to the party. Over time we'll rip our DVD collection to a hard drive and pack up all the physical discs (maybe get rid of them), to create more space. And if I can get agreement from all party members (not a sure thing), we will get a couple of inexpensive cameras and table mics to film and eventually publish to the internet our campaign, the one written and led by Mr S-P.
I'm excited to build the table, and I really have to get started on it ASAP. My next treatment is in six days, and I'd like to have the design and cutting done before then. I'll be doing most of it myself, except a little table saw work that I'll need a partner for. I'm already working on clever paint ideas, but I need to keep those secret until it's all done. I hope it looks nearly as good in real life as it is already becoming in my head.
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