Tarn Aeluin

Technology, soapbox, and crap...

Menegroth – Building a “Man Cave”

Menegroth, the underground city of the Elves in the First Age of middle earth, was home to Beren for several years. Now again in this age it will be re-born with a few less than 1000 rooms 🙂 Finally after many years of saving we are starting our basement “man cave” project. Since no basement is complete without a good dose of technology along with cool tools and construction pics, I’ll be documenting this project here at Tarn Aeluin as we go along. I’m not doing this work myself – I certainly know my limits. I’ve got a local basement specialist to get this done.

Menegroth – Features and Design Considerations

We have a decent space to work with, but there are definitely specific things (in order of priority) we want to get out of the space we have:

  1. Of course we need a TV or large screen viewing space
  2. We want a decent sized exercise space for several pieces of equipment and possibly enough room for karate.
  3. A full bathroom with a decent post-exercise shower
  4. Retain enough storage and “workroom” space that we don’t have to fill up the regular house/garage with all things things we have to take out of the basement.
  5. A bar-ish type space (a “beer grotto”) without really a strong desire to get a full wet bar with lots of alcohol type stuff. More a food/snack/beer serving kinda thing.
  6. We want to design features that remind us of previous houses/apartments and places we have been that are important to us.

From a design perspective we want a space that is integrated into the house with a similar style and color palette. We would like the space to not look like a “basement”, but just another floor in the house. To achieve this we’ll use the same paint colors, real cabinetry for the spaces, and create a few interesting spaces with entry ways similar to upstairs. We also hope (depending on costs) to have some stonework accents that match our stone fireplace upstairs.

As we go thru the project I’ll add new pages for the various phases and cool parts of the project:

A special thanks to our friends at EBCON Services for helping us design, plan, and complete this project.