There are a million things that I love about my wife, but one of the things that I am coming to appreciate the most is her vision for making our home more than just a home, making it our dream home. Though I have a bit of flair in how I like to decorate or set up my spaces so that I can enjoy the fruits of my collection, my creativity is sort of limited in this department. The proudest I’ve been was when I set up my side of our home office with various prints, ephemera, and dead media so that I had a fun backdrop for my appearance in the recent Wolfman’s Got Nards documentary that I was super lucky to be a part of…
My wife, on the other hand, has a much larger grand vision for our house and with the help of my father-in-law we were able to implement one of her projects in our basement this past year. We’re both huge fans of film and independently we had amassed rather large collections of movies on VHS, DVD, and Blu-Ray over the years. When we got together and merged our collections it was pretty large. Large enough that we felt like we needed a room to store them all. That was the initial problem, where to store the collection. At first I was happy with the idea of building a large set of shelving in out basement, like a cubby system where there would be room for all of it, though not necessarily displayed. This seemed like the easiest in terms of available room, the cost of materials, and time to build the shelving.
But Jaime, understandably, wanted something more out of a potential storage solution. Her mind was drifting to something much more creative in terms of maximizing our available space and making it, well, awesome to look at. Simply put, she floated the idea of turning part of our basement space into and old school video rental store. Our home was built in 1947, so it was hardly designed with our needs in mind. In particular, our basement is an odd beast of an area. Split into three rooms, two of which have a lot of exposed ductwork and under-flooring, the area has a low ceiling (I can touch my head to the ceiling by standing on tip toe) and a floor that slightly slopes down to the center of the foundation. It wasn’t intended to be a living area, but at some point one of the owners did a halfway decent job of finishing one of the larger rooms, so we’ve made it our screening room. There is a small room/area off of this main room that houses our well pump that Jaime suggested we could finish and turn into our personal video store.
To be honest, I couldn’t see it in my head. The space just seemed too tight and weirdly shaped (there are a lot of nooks and crannies), and I am probably the furthest thing from a handyman there is, so it was going to take a lot of convincing. Luckily, Jaime’s father is a former contractor and knows his way around drywall, studs, and tools very well. So over the course of last winter and spring we got to work studding out the area, wiring it for electric and lights, and put up some drywall. We closed off the well pump in a custom closet, and set out framing the space in such a way that we’d maximize the surface are of the walls for track shelving that would give us the rental store vibe we were shooting for.
When it came to picking out the shelving, we definitely had a budget but also wanted this to last, so we decided to go with finished steel tracks and braces (expensive but hopefully long-lasting) and composite wood shelving (to save some money.) In hindsight, the composite shelving is an alright choice, it was certainly the right price and has a look we liked, but there are a lot of issues with that material that we didn’t think about. First and foremost, the boards can only support so much weight before they start to bend and bow. The idea was to attach all of the tracking to studs for the most support, but there was too much room between studs to adequately hold three tracks per section of wall. We were hoping that since we were mainly storing DVDs and Blu-Rays, that the boards would work with just the two tracks to support them. Buy were we wrong…
As soon as we started piling on DVDs to test the shelves we noticed that within a couple of days the boards were all bowing. We ended up adding a third track rail to every section though only about 50% of them are hitting studs, so we’re hoping that the drywall will support the other rails over time. It’s been over a year since we finished the project and all is well so far, so fingers crossed.
When we finally had all of the tracks and shelves in place we went nuts organizing and labeling everything. Though because of the size of our collection this ended up taking way longer than we anticipated, not to mention that agreeing on what movies fell into what genre was also an unforeseen hurdle, this is the kind of activity that really brings out my inner Zen master. I find something utterly peaceful about this kind of organizing that’s hard to explain.
As a finishing touch to this home video store project we ordered a custom neon sign to brand the room…
All in all, I’m pretty much in love with this room. We managed to fit our entire collection on the walls, and though it doesn’t quite have that video store vibe (hard to do without having some sort of counter to stand behind), it’s close enough that it gives me chills when I browse the shelves. It’s the perfect lesson as well that has once again taught me to just trust my wife. She is kind of a genius when it comes to this sort of project.
