Brooke here:
We’re deep in the post-move ennui, where the work yet to be completed still exists but our bodies make stern fist-shaking threats whenever our minds bring it up. Fortunately, Elizabeth forges on without us. Here, look at the laundry room she built:
I don’t know if I have stressed the “Eli is awesome” part of these posts enough, so I hope the pictures speak for themselves.
The room still isn’t completely finished, as I need to put up some shelves and a laundry table, and Brown needs to frame and install the folding doors. And, as we’re still not sure what we’re going to do with this section of the basement, we didn’t add color to the walls.
Short-term plans (in the next two years) are to replace the (quite elderly) water heater, raise the new heater on a separate wood platform, and put some of those cheap press-n-place laminate tiles on the floor. Long-term plans (five or more years down the road) are to move the water heater, washer, and dryer to a more sensible location, then stock the room with a pinball game and an old Joust Ms. Pac-Man* arcade console.
*Curse you, democratic process. I want my flying ostriches.
Flying by night 
You have obviously never had a basement that [can|does] flood. Wood rots. It’s why you always see stuff up on cinder blocks. The more important question is do you see any flood marks on the wall that can show how high it gets?
Four words: Sump pump plus generator. The basement probably flooded frequently until those and some French drains were installed. Now it just gets damp.
Oh. “Horizontal braces are installed,” I read aloud to my husband, “and then sheetrock is hung. This is how we know they’re on the East Coast, not the west. Horizontal braces, but no diagonal ones … and sheetrock, but no plywood to reinforce the bracing. They only have to worry about hurricanes, not earthquakes.” “They should have diagonal bracing and plywood anyway,” says husband.
You must really have fallen in love with this place…
Sufficient drainage should be helpful even with the most flood prone basements however.
Give my compliments to Elizabeth, she works like a proverbial drafthorse.
Joust is absolutely superior to Ms. Pacman. Get those ostriches!
You need a MAME cabinet. Joust _and_ Ms. Pacman. And Mappy and frogger and Mr. Do and Bubble Bobble and…
What Rob said.
If you can build a room, building an arcade cabinet should be a snap – and there are various companies which sell the buttons, joysticks and so on, fairly inexpensively. (For example, http://www.happcontrols.com/ or http://www.ultimarc.com/ – the latter also sells various controller boards to interface the controls with your computer).
If you have old computer parts lying around, you can build one very cheaply (I used an old motherboard, hard drive and monitor, and in addition to the buttons and joysticks I bought, cobbled together a spin controller out of an old ball-type mouse and a few bucks’ worth of common hardware – http://arcadecontrols.com/files/Miscellaneous/spinner.pdf – which was the most involved part of the whole project).
Then just add MAME – http://mamedev.org/ – and Google for “MAME ROMs” to find your favorite games.