Oh, my aching back!

Okay, I’ll admit it. Ed and I have a nice game collection. According to BoardgameGeek, it’s 549 strong, although I think that includes game expansions. It’s the result of about 5 years of the unbridled game purchasing of two gaming fanatics. However, this past week I’ve envied those new gamers just getting into the hobby and those seasoned gaming veterans who are able to purge their collection periodically and keep it at sane levels. Why? Because for the last two weeks, we’ve been moving into a new house. Since our new home is only 25 miles from the old one, and we have both a minivan and a pickup truck, we decided to save some money and move most of it ourselves, leaving just the heavy furniture and books for the professional movers. Do you know how many trips it took to move all these games? It took AT LEAST two full Ford F150 pickup truck loads, probably more, of big, heavy boxes that each took the two of us to unload and carry. And, of course, we now need to find a place to put all these games, which leads me to my next topic.

Since we designed and built this house from scratch with our builder, we keep getting asked if we included a gaming room in the design. Well, no, we didn’t. As the square footage of the house rises, so does the price. Our dream house required some slimming and trimming to make it a reality. Besides which, we really don’t need dedicated gaming space. There is definitely a benefit of both spouses being gaming fanatics. You see, unlike most wives, I WANT the gaming collection to be displayed out in the open for all to see. I enjoy looking at it. It’s my collection, too. When we have people over to play games, they don’t need to be tucked away where the activity won’t bother me as I’m sure to be playing as well. The whole house, except maybe the bedrooms, is the “game room.” I do think it would have been nice to have a basement that could be a dedicated game room. Alas, basements are few and far between in this part of Texas. Dig a little around these parts and you quickly hit a bed of limestone.

That said, we did include a few features with gaming in mind. We have this really cool second story loft space overhanging our living room. Ed plans to build floor-to-ceiling shelves in it to hopefully store and display the entire game collection in one place. Right now the games are scattered in various bookcases around the house. Some are still in boxes as well. Another thing we did was place a fan and bright track lighting over our dining room table instead of the usual chandelier. We also made sure we had extra floor space to set up card tables. Now all we need is some more gamers! We hope to have our Round Rock group up for some weekend gaming by July 4th. We’ll see if we can make it happen despite all the boxes still left to unpack.

Posted by Susan Rozmiarek at June 10, 2005 10:56 PM