You wanted to see photos of the finished study/office/retro gaming room, right? No? Well tough titty, you're seeing them anyway, because my wife worked her arse off on this all week, then I did a bit of work putting stuff back where it's supposed to be. The results are, I hope you'll agree, striking and pleasing.
First, a slightly out-of-date "before" shot, if it please you:
The whole thing was getting a bit cluttered, so we had a bit of a clear-out a while back. With a heavy heart, I packed away the "real hardware" Atari computers, since the vast majority of stuff I do with them for video is via emulation anyway, and those went in the loft. A bunch of the software that didn't really need to be on display — mostly stuff like productivity software for the Atari ST, and big box PC games I didn't have a means of installing (and which, in most cases, I had digital copies of anyway) — also went in the loft.
Over on the desk on the right, I also upgraded to a two-monitor setup to use with the mini PC I bought a while back, so I could make the room dual purpose: retro gaming space and home office. Aside from those changes, this is pretty much the state of the room before. Note the grotty horrible carpet that came with the house and the unnecessary wall-mounted TV. (We put that in with the intention of using it for Chromecasting YouTube videos and suchlike, but I never used it, so my wife has reclaimed it to put in her shed.)
Behold, then, the glorious transformation that has unfolded over the last week!
Would ya look at that? A few simple changes and it looks like there's much more space. Plus you will hopefully notice the subtle change in overall design, colour scheme and theming. My wife wanted to go loud with the decor in here, to fit with the "retro" vibe. I wasn't entirely convinced on her colour choices to begin with, particularly the yellow, but I had also made a moderate deal out of not really caring what colours she picked, because, frankly, I didn't.
Y'see, I grew up in a house where the default was to paint the walls white. This isn't a criticism of my parents; it made for a nice, consistent, clean look throughout the whole house that could then be supplemented with additional wall decorations such as pictures, bookshelves, ornaments and suchlike. It works for them, and with the house having looked that way for so long now, I wouldn't have it any other way, even if as a kid I sometimes wished they wouldn't be so boring every time they painted a room.
To be fair, I don't remember them redecorating any rooms very often, which is the one benefit of painting them something plain: you don't really need to redo them unless you damage them significantly, which never happened in my time living in that house. The one major change they've made since I moved out is expanding the downstairs toilet into a full-on shower room, replacing a little weird closety alcove thing that used to be at one end of the entrance hallway.
But I digress. Fact is, I grew up in a house that was predominantly painted white, and thus I never really developed any particularly strong preferences about decor. Walls were just walls.
Andie had a plan, though, so I trusted in her sense of style (which has done the rest of our house proud, to be fair) and allowed her to do her thing, painting the coving, skirting boards, doors, frames and radiator bright yellow, with a contrasting deep turquoise for the walls and ceiling. Two walls would be a sort of "feature" with that incredibly loud wallpaper.
One of the main reasons Andie wanted to do up this room was not to change its design and colour scheme, but to replace that horrible carpet. And, she figured, since we'd have to rip everything out to do the floor, we may as well change up the design a bit also.
We've replaced nearly all our carpets across the whole house with laminate flooring now; at this point, only the spare bedroom still has carpet; all of the rest save for the toilet (tiles) and bathroom (vinyl flooring) is laminate floor. It's a change for the better; much easier to keep clean (particularly with cats) and it just looks plain nice. It gives rooms a nice feeling of space that grotty old carpet just doesn't quite provide. I might feel differently if we had had nice carpets in here originally, but we emphatically did not.
We took the opportunity to tidy up my setup a bit, also. Rather than having everything connected all at once, I decided to put just the main console units on display on the shelves, and keep the SCART cables and power adapters in an easily accessible set of drawers beneath one of the desks. That way, if I want to play on a particular console, I can just bring it down off the shelf, pick out the appropriate cables, hook it up and play.
To better facilitate this, we also invested in some desktop plug sockets, which are a brilliant thing. No more ferreting around behind the desk to plug and unplug things, which was always a nightmare even when I wasn't as fabulously fat and unfit as I am now. Now I just plug and unplug from the desktop itself. Sorted.
Here's Patti checking out the Atari ST games. Yes, I know the spine for Hostages is the other way around to all the other games. For some reason, a significant number of French games insisted on printing their spines the opposite way around to literally everything else on the ST. Ah, the French, and all that.
And here's Patti offering her thoughts following her inspection of the entire room. I think she approves. I certainly do.
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