Bike cellar/workshop/man cave

Oh how I would love a man cave! More importantly, where is the beer fridge going?

From experience....it'll get damn dusty if you don't block up the voids that lead to floor joists...if you do block up remember to put in vents.

Weirdly this doesn't seem to be a problem. If I go digging around in the void it makes some dust but if it's left alone it's a not a problem, it just sits there. I wouldn't rule out blocking them off in future though, as much for aesthetic reasons as anything, but also I quite fancy turning the gaps between the brick 'columns' into shelves, but first I need to get in under there to insulate under our floorboards. Which will be a horrible job, but it needs doing.

The self levelling compound isn't tough enough to leave on it's own- it'll fail in high traffic areas.

This is definitely true, we need to get some flooring down soon as really.

I have a gas meter that needs moving- could you pm me how much it cost and who did it?

Still working on this! Will let you know.

Floor-wise, arguably it's more practical to have something soft for this sort of workshop. Not only will you drop things on it, but you wouldn't want, for example, to damage a frame if you dropped that on something unforgiving. If you've sorted out the drainage, what about cork? It's really cheap, so can be replaced when shabby. Also, you can get it in white, which satisfies the 'simple' criterion.

I like the cork idea, thanks. My builder approves too. The other half is open to it but it all comes down to the colour, it's not really my choice! The colour of the latex meets with approval but it can't stay. I quite like natural cork, but I'm wondering if an entire cellar floor of it would be too much.

So, on with the show and tell :)

Once we'd got everything back down in the cellar, I quickly realised that one electrical socket wasn't going to be enough. Also the wiring was a bit of a mess, with junction boxes and wires hanging in mid-air in the void below the joists. It was definitely not Part P compliant so I got my sparky hat on and tidied it up.

Nothing wrong with a glass of scrumpy while doing a bit of wiring, right?

I fitted two new double plug sockets, they're just metal back boxes (properly earthed) mounted on pieces of OSB (Oriented Strand Board), and altered the existing one to match.

I love this stuff, it's cheap, easy to work with and has an interesting texture to it.

Much tidier, although I could still do with spending some time perfecting it, the important thing was that there was now plenty of accessible power and the house wasn't going to burn down.

One of the reasons we needed power down there (and here starts the slightly OCD tendencies!) was because I'd promised that my ugly computer, printer and other technology would be hidden away in the cellar, and not in our living room.

So I ran cables under the floor up the living room (a very long monitor cable and a very long USB cable). The only problem was that the corner we'd selected didn't have any plugs, and the cables were going to have to exit the wall somehow. So I got busy...

Ta da! Only monitor and keyboard in the living room.

(The unplugged lamp in this picture bothers me, but this was during the Tour and I can't be bothered to tidy my desk up for a photo).

At this point although I'd finished upstairs, the PC was still on the floor of the cellar, so I made some shelves out of OSB, batten and those Ikea brackets for sloping walls we discussed up the thread.

(EKBY RISET)

Pretty rough but they do the job and look quite nice.

So my computer now has somewhere to live.

I then bought a Playstation so I could play Grand Theft Auto, which also lives in the cellar. To cut a long story short (blame Dell and their daft connections) I had to buy a new monitor to use both through the same screen.

My old monitor wasn't worth much, so naturally it got relegated to the cellar.

Perfect for viewing instructions on the Park tools website while tinkering with my bikes :)

Oh and, importantly...

Oh how I would love a man cave! More importantly, where is the beer fridge going?

There is no beer fridge (not very environmentally friendly) but there is a WALL MOUNTED SCRUMPY BOX.

20 litres of 7% Devon goodness, kept at the perfect temperature (not too hot, not too cold) on tap :)

TOP TECHNOLOGY POST!

Very impressed, however for me it would be a total pain in the tits to go down stairs to turn things on or change discs.

Few questions:

1. how did you get the PS3 remote to work between floors?
   
2. Is that a hackintosh, if so what spec is it / version is OS.X is it running?
   
3. How do you browse down stairs? KVM switch or something? are the screens extended or mirrored?
   

Oh and, importantly...

There is no beer fridge (not very environmentally friendly) but there is a WALL MOUNTED SCRUMPY BOX.

20 litres of 7% Devon goodness, kept at the perfect temperature (not too hot, not too cold) on tap :)

LOVE IT!! One day, I will have my cave!

This is very inspirational but aren't cellars/basements 'naturally' damp eventually ?

TOP TECHNOLOGY POST!

Very impressed, however for me it would be a total pain in the tits to go down stairs to turn things on or change discs.

Few questions:

1. how did you get the PS3 remote to work between floors?
   
2. Is that a hackintosh, if so what spec is it / version is OS.X is it running?
   
3. How do you browse down stairs? KVM switch or something? are the screens extended or mirrored?
   
   

It is a hackintosh, I don't go downstairs to turn it on or off, I just send it to sleep then wake it up again by pressing a button on the keyboard.

1. I checked before I bought it how it works and it's bluetooth or similar, so it just works. There's a floor in the way but that's just like having a wall in the way with bluetooth I guess.
   
2. It's a i5 3570K, Gigabyte motherboard, 16Gb DDR3. It's got an SSD and a normal hard disc and I made my own fusion drive. Currently on 10.8.3 but can definitely be upgraded to Mavericks, I just haven't got round to it.
   
3. Screens can be extended or mirrored, at the moment it's mirrored as I have no controls downstairs but I've got a USB compact keyboard and a USB mouse I'm just going to plug in and put on the shelf next to the Playstation.
   

This is very inspirational but aren't cellars/basements 'naturally' damp eventually ?

I think only if there's not enough ventilation. This has plenty of ventilation, so at the moment it's full of cold dry air, and with the steps we've taken along the way to keep the damp out it should be fine. It wasn't actually damp beforehand, so they are more precautionary. Our bathroom, which doesn't have good ventilation, is a lot damper than the cellar.

I reckon the best test is 'do things go damp if you put them in the cellar' and that's a no, so I reckon we're alright.

I guess only time will tell in the long run, but I can't really see any reason it would get more damp...

There's definitely no rising damp ;)

Thinking about it I don't think extending the displays would really work spotter as they aren't alongside each other. If that makes sense?

I think only if there's not enough ventilation. This has plenty of ventilation, so at the moment it's full of cold dry air, and with the steps we've taken along the way to keep the damp out it should be fine. It wasn't actually damp beforehand, so they are more precautionary. Our bathroom, which doesn't have good ventilation, is a lot damper than the cellar.

I reckon the best test is 'do things go damp if you put them in the cellar' and that's a no, so I reckon we're alright.

I guess only time will tell in the long run, but I can't really see any reason it would get more damp...

There's definitely no rising damp ;)

Ok - as you say only time will tell in the long run .

All the best with this .

There is EVEN MOAR technology, if you can take it...

The whole setup is connected with ethernet cable, which runs to the back of the hall where the router and modem live on the wall (I put them here so the wi-fi covers the garden).

The power supplies for these live in the cellar and power cables run up, so there aren't wires trailing everywhere.

I really need to get round to painting around the back box and fitting a cover like the one under the desk...

There's a switch near the computer:

The hi-fi in the living room has a DAC on top and there are digital outputs running from the hackintosh and the Playstation up to that.

There are also analogue outputs from both running upstairs to the hi-fi, just in case...

The cabinet with the hi-fi on top has a hole cut in the back to give access to the plug sockets but also for access to another back box that wires run out of (I have put a cover on this one).

There's an airport express in here and a USB cable runs up from the printer so we can print wirelessly from anywhere in the flat. There's also an optical out from this to the DAC. Plus an ethernet cable, of course.

I wanted to be able to listen to music/the radio in the cellar, and thought about buying something separate, but then our hi-fi broke so we bought the one up there ^^ which happened to have two sets of speaker outputs, so I just ran speaker cable down and bought another set of speakers.

You can use the buttons on the front to have music in the living room, the cellar, or both, which is cool :)

All of this means our Victorian flat is more wired and technologically advanced than your average new build. It's all the cellar's fault, I wouldn't have been able to do it if we didn't have one!

Awesome thread.
It does leave me pondering whether I should go and find a DIY forum to frequent instead of lfgss though!

wow, envious to say the least. Bravo

Awesome thread.
It does leave me pondering whether I should go and find a DIY forum to frequent instead of lfgss though!

Totally.

Best read on lfgss in ages, I think I need to read the b and q forum.

Nice technological additions!

amazing, and i thought tiling my under-stair space and putting up a tool wall made a good bike cave!

I would love something like this! Such inspiration, very wow!

This is great!
I need one of these.

This is great, thoroughly enjoying the tech talk!
What you need is some sort of bluetooth interface so that all of this; screens, speakers etc can be controllable from your mobile!
Also, I love that PC case, I built my best friend's hackintosh in it. Very jealous of this mancave. Have some rep.

So much win.

Are these the 2020i? What do you think?

Thanks all, feeling the DIY love! I guess a man cave taps into some deep primordial instinct? Or something...

The Screwfix forum has come up quite a lot when I've been searching for stuff online by the way, but y'know, we'd hate to lose you.

Elvis - yep, they are the 2020i. I think they're great, better than I was expecting actually. Compared to the set of Acoustic Energy Aegis One's I've got upstairs they are brighter and sharper, but in a good way. I'm not convinced they aren't the better set of speakers of the two sets but the rooms are very different so it's hard to say. The brackets are good too, which was helpful.

So the final big DIY job will make you less envious - sanding the wooden stairs and the triangle of pine cladding next to them. Both of these are, as far as we can establish, original features, so about 150 years old. The cladding was pretty manky looking and a grey greenish colour: I suspect the Victorian builders treated it with something, but God knows what.

The stairs were slightly less manky but still not great, they'd been treated with some dark brown stain or varnish at some point but definitely not recently. This is what they looked like before we did anything:

This was the pine cladding in the early days of sanding. The band at the top shows you what it was like before. The grey/green dust that came off that was pretty horrible and I was glad of my dust mask.

It took quite a bit of work to get to this point. I'm not going to lie, sanding is hard work! Especially when sanding a vertical surface - doing the stairs was easier as I could put my weight on the sander. It's noisy and dusty, plus I was also doing it in a fairly confined space of course.

Still, it led to some attractive selfies...

When I started out I connected our Henry to the sander I was using to suck up the dust, but he had a habit of getting hot and bothered after a while and cutting out. So in a (mostly successful) attempt to stop the cellar filling with dust I made a 'tent' out of dust sheets :)

By this point the the cladding was pretty much there and I'd got started on the stairs.

The strip at the top was a bit narrow to fit a power sander in - even a detail sander - plus the wire to the light switch ran along the bottom of the recessed strip.