THE LIVING ROOM

Boomer Cave Entertainment Center

Pre-Construction

This was the first major project specifically made for 3rd Floor. Drake Keating's old room in TKE had been given the nickname "Boomer Cave" due to the mountain of old shit he had accumulated in the room. When Drake moved into 3rd Floor, the name Boomer Cave still held some relevance. One key component of his old TKE room was the old Zenith TV, bookshelf speakers, a car bumper shelf, and his vinyl records. Drake needed a neat way to display and use all this while also being functional and taking up little floor space, which led him to the idea of building a large entertainment center.

When it came to designing and building the entertainment center, Drake only had a couple of key considerations in mind. First, he needed to incorporate the old car bumper into the shelf, and second, he needed to make sure the space next to the TV was large enough to fit the speakers. One challenge Drake faced during this build was that he couldn’t work on the project at 3rd Floor; he was only able to build it at TKE. Due to this limitation, the entertainment center had to be designed modularly to be transported to the apartment.

The entertainment center was designed in four parts: the bottom vinyl section, the top bumper section, and two speaker sections. These parts were just barely small enough to be stuffed in the back of Drake's Jeep Wrangler for transport and storage in the 3rd floor garage. One of Drake's main memories from this experience was how goddamn heavy the top section with the bumper was. If that thing were ever to fall, you better pray to god you weren’t in the way.

Construction

At one point during the summer of 2021, Drake, along with Jack Gutting and Dylan Rose, moved back to the apartment to start cleaning and setting things up. It was sometime during this period that Drake finally put up the Boomer Cave Entertainment Center, and it hasn’t been moved since, as of fall 2024.

SNEC - Super Nintendo Entertainment Center

Pre-Construction

While working in Washington State, Drake Keating came up with the idea to make a smaller entertainment center, not too different from the large one with the Zenith TV. He wanted to display and use the Super Nintendo he had along with an early 2000s CRT TV. The cool thing about CRTs from this era was that they displayed retro games at an almost emulator-level quality.

(SIDE NOTE: This CRT was taken from the local church Drake attended during his childhood. It hadn’t been used for literally god knows how long, so they were more than willing to just let him have it. In addition, this CRT was on the top shelf of the back bar from the first iteration of the 3rd Floor Bar.)

Drake drew up many different designs for how he wanted everything set up, eventually settling on a layout with the consoles on the bottom, the TV in the middle, games on the sides, and vinyl records on top. The top of the unit also worked as a great place to set a small radio and 8-track player.

Construction

Drake built the entire entertainment center in the TKE garage. He had planned out the parts well enough that most of them were pre-cut at Lowes, and he assembled and stained everything in the garage. The building process went smoothly, which was great until Drake fucked up and missed a crucial issue: he had built the thing too big to fit in his Jeep.

By this point, it was 9:00 pm on a weekday, so most people were unavailable. Drake was lucky enough to harass one of the few people with a truck, then-president Joe Schroeder, into helping him. They got back to 3rd Floor around 10:00 pm, unloaded the entertainment center, and Drake thanked Joe for his help. After Joe left, Drake started to push it into the house, but the friction from the carpet and the wood ripped off two of the bottom side pieces. Exhausted, Drake left it in the hallway and fixed and installed everything the next day after class.

Drake wired everything up to an AV switch that connects to the back of the TV. There are four different outlets: Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Nintendo 64, and Roku. The consoles are set up at the bottom, and the power cords run out of a hole in the back. Small side shelves were built around the TV to hold Atari games, and the top is used to store vinyl records and extra game controllers.

Future Plans

This is one of the few projects Drake will not be leaving in Rolla. He plans to give it to his younger nephews for them to enjoy. A lot of the retro games Drake owns are hand-me-downs from his older half-brother. He sees it as fitting that these games will find their way back to the children of the person who gave them to him.