Colin and I should be on HGTV.
Brothers can be completely different, get on each others’ nerves, and be super-competitive. All of that can describe Colin and me at some point past or present, if not in an ongoing sense. But brothers- in this case we– can totally be on the same wavelength sometimes.
Colin’s drums have been in the FROG1 for several weeks now, to give him more room to jam with his friends. With about half of my guitars and both of my amps up there for roughly the same reason- just to get them out of my room- and Daniel’s and Jacob’s guitars and guitar cases sometimes present, it’s been a pretty hazardous place to be lately.
So between a general desire to be able to safely navigate the FROG and complaints from everyone in the house, Colin started cleaning it up yesterday. This was also motivated by the addition of a powered mixer and two speakers.
For those of you not really into sound equipment, that’s basically a small, portable all-in-one PA system designed with microphones and instruments in mind, but with enough cables and adapters, you can hook anything into it: TV, Xbox, iPod, computer… you get the idea.
Without asking what the vision was or the plan of action for getting there, I joined in the cleaning. It was obvious to anyone that the room simply needed to be cleared out, rearranged, and organized if even a fraction of its contents were to remain and the room was to become easily traversed. But it was obvious to the Peck boys the potential this room now had to become what Kelli would call a “man cave.”
First order of business, pack up the instruments. Fortunately there was only one guitar present at the time that did not belong to me, so all the cases were handy. The air hockey table was pushed against the window and all guitars placed underneath. The Foosball table was pushed against the daybed by another wall and the chairs pushed up against that. Amazingly, this caused a sudden hole in the middle of the room from which to work against the remaining chaos.
While Colin set up his drums (and I think he finally has all his drums and cymbals set up together, which takes quite a bit of space) I began clearing off the computer desk, mom’s drafting table and the shelf behind the drums where the VCR2 was located. We finished at roughly the same time, with a net result of extended the open space and having two more surfaces to work from.
Before I knew it, Colin was pulling an old TV cabinet out of the closet. We have these two huge closets in the FROG where the roof slants down on either side of the dormer where the daybed is located. One is used to store camping and sewing equipment and the other is used to store Christmas decorations and old toys so that any of the above are accessible at shorter notice than they would be if they lived in the cubby3. The particular TV cabinet that Colin was pulling out is a pretty small, cheap, black shelving unit and formerly where the family TV downstairs lived. It is only a couple feet tall and the TV sat on top with the shelves underneath storing movies and Super NES accessories. When my parents replaced it with a nicer piece of furniture, I talked them into keeping it in case I ever finish college and leave and want it.
Colin got the powered mixer set up on top, with the Xbox 360 on top of that, and I set up the VCR and Gamecube underneath, running all the cables and putting four generations’ worth of video games into their respective cases as I went. Colin set up the speakers and with a couple of really useful adapters, I set up my laptop on the drafting table and connected it to the mixer, thus enabling me to stream music from my desktop in my room over the wireless network and play it through the newly-re-erected sound system.
With the furniture back in place, I thought we’d be finished. But Colin mentioned a general desire to have his computer up there for recording purposes. I figured we might as well get that done while we were on a roll, so with some quick thinking and some maternal advice, the drafting table was folded up and moved to the corner where the computer desk was. The computer desk was taken downstairs and placed in my van for transport to Albemarle Music (more on this below). The other closet, this time the one with the Christmas decorations- including tree- was accessed, cleared completely out, and a folding table removed from the very back, from behind about two dozen boxes and really heavy wooden shelving unit.
The folding table was erected, fitting perfectly against the wall between the end of the TV cabinet and the door, and about this time, Daniel showed up intending to pick up his laptop and leave, but staying to help move Colin’s (monster) desktop computer from his room to the FROG. This was quite an adventure because though Colin’s room and the FROG share a wall, you have to go from Colin’s through the upstairs hall, down the stairs, through the foyer, den, kitchen, and back hall, then up the other set of stairs to reach the FROG.
With the computer set up and the chairs replaced, we transported ourselves, the desk, and our moving and staging skills to Albemarle Music. We initially moved the couch in the office, then moved it back when we realized its new angle made the room feel much smaller. With the desk placed against the back wall, we moved the office computer off the counter and now have a much more professional-looking space and enough surface area for three people to eat lunch at once.
In summation, we’re awesome and so is the new man cave. Pictures are forthcoming, and if anyone wants an air hockey table, let me know.
1FROG is a real estate term in this region that’s become pretty ubiquitous in tidewater area vocabulary. It stands for Finished Room Over Garage and is what most of the rest of the country would refer to as a “Bonus Room.”
2Yes, believe it or not, we still have a VCR. It wasn’t that long ago that it got a lot of use for watching Disney movies with all my female friends- one in particular- and now mainly serves to extend the coaxial cable from the wall to the TV and as an extra set of RCA inputs for gaming systems.
3The cubby is an eccentricity of our house. Despite two attic access doors, one in the FROG and one in the upstairs hall, because of their precise locations the attic is still pretty inaccessible, and the cubby serves as our attic. It is basically a crawl-space-sized hall stretching from an access door at the top of the FROG stairs back over the rest of the house.
