How to Decorate Like a Geek: Making it Work for You

If you’ve read the first two parts of How to Decorate Like a Geek, you’ve heard some of our tricks and tips for incorporating your geekdom into your house and doing it relatively inexpensively, but what we haven’t addressed is how we ignored the expected molds to get our house exactly the way we wanted it.

Our House and Choices

Here are some of the big choices we made and how they have worked for us.

About two years ago we moved to a three-bedroom, 1,600-square-foot manufactured home. It came with challenges. The rooms are narrow and long, not square, and the space was not divided as we thought would make the most sense. But we wanted to decorate in a geek-style that fit our lifestyle, not some preconceived notions of what a home should look like.

That’s Not a Living Room

One of our first choices was to repurpose the living room. Our home has a small entry way at the front door and then opens into a room that was supposed to be the living room. Then you pass through an archway into what is supposed to be the dining room. From there you can walk into the kitchen and then on the far side of the kitchen is the breakfast nook. We immediately knew we didn’t need two separate rooms for eating.

We chose to make the breakfast nook into a dining room, complete with a table that will seat up to six, but that is comfortable for just the two of us when the leaf is not extended. The table in the dining room can also double as a spot for board games or miniature games that don’t need more than a 4' x 4' play area.

That meant the room that the manufacturer thought was a dining room could be repurposed to something else. Then, in a stroke of serendipity, we found a gaming table for sale on Meetup. The gamer who built the table was moving to California and not taking the table with him. While the table was too large for the old dining room, it fit, though not perfectly, in what was supposed to be the living room.

The living room became our game room, complete with gaming-related artwork on the walls, bookshelves for our role-playing games, and comfy office chairs at the gaming table. It stayed that way for a few years until we passed that table on to another gamer and had a gaming table custom designed for our space.

The table in that room now is large enough to accommodate any war gaming we want to do, has a hidden compartment underneath the surface to store our neoprene gaming mats, and has shelves for books or other storage as well.

The much smaller original dining room area got designated as our living room. The problem with that is the area wasn’t large enough for a sofa to fit comfortably. So now we have a living room without a couch.

Instead, we opted for two recliners with a table between them for our laptops and an oversized ottoman for the cat. The smaller space fits our living room needs perfectly. There’s not a lot of seating for company, but most of the time our company is sitting around the game table anyway.

Spare Bedroom or Hobby Room

We also knew that one of the bedrooms would be becoming a home office, but initially we thought the second spare bedroom would become a great place to hang out and play video games. After the redesign of the living room, it was just the right size to sit in a recliner and play PS4 games. And, we still needed a place to store all our board games and miniatures.

Eventually, that bedroom became more of a hobby room or spare office. My husband uses it primarily for painting miniatures, but it is also the storage space for our tabletop games. And in the event that we have overnight visitors, a quality queen-sized air mattress makes it visitor friendly without being useless space the rest of the time.

Choosing Room Themes

The front office theme was easy as it would be the most often used by strangers, customers coming into pay their storage bills, so we wanted something that would be acceptable to the general public.

After 20 years I had an extensive collection of Nightmare Before Christmas stuff that we supplemented with some additional artwork and the room was basically done. The neat part of it is that now people know I collect NBC stuff and I received additions to my collections from acquaintances who have seen my office.

I’ve received resin Nightmare Town buildings, small figures and a Zero teapot from customers who found them cheap and gave them to me.

For Thor’s office/hobby room, we initially thought we would go with comic characters, but instead found Sideshow Collectibles Court of the Dead series of artwork. The Court artwork overflows the room a bit and adorns the door of that room as well.

The bathroom that is adjacent to the office is also sometimes used by customers, so we again wanted to be non-offensively geek. It’s completed Star Wars themed now, right down to the bath mat and shower curtain.

In our entry way, we opted for artwork we loved that didn’t fit anywhere else in the house. The Deadpool and Rocket prints came from comic cons, the Snake Plissken and Punisher prints came from Sideshow.

The game room we initially intended to fill with artwork related to the games we love. We have a statue of a Hanging Judge from Deadlands, a pair of Brom prints from Shadowrun and Deadlands, and a Larry Elmore piece from the Forgotten Realms novels. But after that, we weren’t sure what gaming-related art we wanted, so we ended up instead with a wall of DC heroes and villains, including Batman, the Joker, Harley Quinn, Wonder Woman and Superman. Over the arch way into the living room, we’re adding fairy tale prints from our favorite Patreon artist.

After seven years in the house, and a pandemic, we decided to rotate the game-related artwork out for a bit. It’s in our storage unit right now and has been replaced by Inuyasha and Ghost in the Machine prints.

The living room theme is Cthulhu. From the Coming of Azathoth over the television to the King in Yellow and even the Dark Pharaoh, many aspects of the mythos adorn the room. The statue on one side of the television is a giant HorrorClix Cthulhu.

The kitchen has a mishmash of collectibles on the high shelves including the fan from my best friend’s wedding, and the monsters from Where the Wild Things Are dancing above the stove. Last year, we updated that with some vinyl clings featuring the cover art from the book, so the statues are in their own environment.

The dining room is our true comic book room with art from our favorite comic artists including Jim Lee and Alex Ross. The Alex Ross print is a Marvel limited edition and also signed by Stan Lee!

In the master bedroom, the Dark Land of Oz used to cohabitate with Todd McFarland action figures including Movie Maniacs and Lost Souls. But last year we replaced the Dark Oz artwork with a collection of Alex Ross Universal Monsters prints.

Only the master bathroom has fully escaped the geek decorating and that’s mostly due to the fact that we worried the humidity of the bathroom would ruin our artwork.

As the years have progressed, we have added new things to our collection as well. I’m very fond of the dice dragons By Dragons and Beaties and have found room for them in amongst my Nightmare office.

Friends gifted us a clock made from an old album and laser cut to display the bat signal over Gotham.

The nice reality of decorating like a geek is that it makes it easier for friends to see what you have, what you love and what they can gift you to enhance your collection.

What have you done to display your geekdom in your home?