Renos - Building a Man Cave

Starting in October 2014 I decided it was time to finish renovating my basement.  Half of my basement was built by the home builder (a rec room and a bathroom) and the back half was left unfinished (just a large space with the furnace, water heater and laundry).  Over the years of living here the room slowly became disorganized and full of junk (not hoarder level junk but still a mess).  Building code when my house was built only required insulation half way down the wall in a basement.  You can see the mess of a 'back room' on the left.  The entire process took 5 months (lots of weekends and after work).  I've never done something like this before but youtube is an incredible resource.  Lots of research and about 50 hours at home depot (always forgetting something) and I finished at the end of February.  A few WIP shots below (not to be too boring).

A few days of moving everything out of the room, pulling out old insulation, aluminum framed fire walls and other junk and it was ready to start.  I started by sealing and insulating the rim joist (apparently you lose a lot of heat there) and insulating the walls.  I live in Canada where we hit -40 temperatures in the winter so this is an important step!  After that it was on to framing.  I wanted to separate my new 'nerd room' from the laundry area to reduce the noise and the eye sore.

There were lots of ducts running along the ceiling so I had to frame them in.  I didn't go with a drop ceiling because I think they're ugly, and they lower the ceiling and make it look like a cave.  In this photo you can see all of the insulation I've added.  The outer walls were insulated further with rockwool and the ceiling and inner walls were insulated with a sound dampening material.  I'm hoping that I can make all sorts of nerd noise in here on game night without disturbing anyone else in the house.  There are more advanced ways of 'sound proofing' a room but this was the cheapest and does work.  In practice loud music in here is a very low drone in the living room above it.

And here's the final image!  The room is 16 x 10' in size, perfect for nerding.  The weight bench/exercise area fits on one side and this empty corner now houses my painting area, display cabinets and computer.  Come the spring when it's warm outside I'm going to build a folding table (6x4' obviously!) so there's somewhere to game.  All in all it was a fun experience and now I have my 'man cave'.  Note the cool star wars print I bought online to commemorate my room :)