Last year we started a fairly ambitious home renovation project to turn the garage into a games room. We had a double garage that has never housed our cars – I do wonder who actually uses a garage for a car anymore. Instead, ours was a dumping ground and holding space for all sorts of things. Now the garage has been converted into a family games room.
In this post, I am sharing the result of turning the garage into a games room. We did this for a few reasons, we have teenagers and an adult daughter living with us and they don’t appear to be going anywhere soon! We wanted a family games room that we could enjoy together and for our teenagers to enjoy with friends.
Secondly, it has always been my husband’s dream to have a full-sized snooker table and turning the garage into a games room was the solution! My husband is a fairly good player having played for most of his life. At uni he was a bit of a hustler and won a few competitions at working men’s clubs in the northeast!
The project was born in lockdown but of course, starting then was futile due to the availability of resources and tradespeople. Instead, this time was used to submit plans and start the mammoth task of sorting out the stuff in the garage. It is important to get planning permission if you are doing building work even if you don’t think it is a big change.
We started off by purchasing a garden shed for the essential garden things that we needed to keep – this included the lawnmower and other tools. Then once the garages were empty the building work began. We have revived the garage doors and instead had large windows fitted. The room was insulated, a ceiling was put in and a new floor was added.
The building works took longer than anticipated as it was all done at weekends and covid played its part as work sometimes needed to stop. We also discovered the ever-rising costs during the project which was frustrating but out of our control.
The room already had electricity but it needed rewiring and of course lots of lights and sockets fitting too. Spotlights were added as well as sourcing vintage traditional snooker lighting. We made use of Facebook Marketplace to get some of the finishing touches. This is a great way to save money when turning a garage into a games room. For example, we got the carpet tiles for free and once they were down hiring a carpet cleaner for the weekend and bought them up brilliantly.
Once the room was completed then the real transformation took place! The plan for the room was a games room and the centrepiece was a full-sized restored snooker table. We sourced original features including a vintage scoreboard from the same era as the table. Everything has been done to an incredibly high specification. New brass fittings were added and of course cues and other fittings.
Once the table was in place the finishing touches included a bar and drinks fridge, a huge wall-mounted TV, a dartboard and a surround. A few comfy chairs and other soft furnishings.
The final touches were to add some wall art to the games room and once again this needed to be of high quality. We had some vintage prints that had been in the family for years, these are of old players and names that we grew up with when watching snooker on the TV.
Next we custom-made some wall art from Photowall, the process was super easy we simply uploaded some images and using canva we tweaked them to make some one-of-a-kind wall art. We chose to honour the fabulous snooker play Ronnie O’Sullivan. You can also purchase designer wallpapers and prints – it really is the one-stop shop for your wall art.
We are so so happy with the finished games rooms and it has already been well used. We can see that turning the garage into a games room is a great solution for our family home. It provides teenagers with a place to hang out or an escape room for the grown-ups!
