When Jeremy Partridge, owner of Brookfield, Mass.-based Jerokee Flooring, set out to create a game room for his kids, he went beyond adding the typical board games and arcade machines—he turned the whole floor into a game. Partridge has been keeping a notebook with fun wood flooring designs for years, so constructing a game room was the perfect opportunity to execute a Pac-Man maze design from his notebook.
The wooden Pac-Man maze is 289 square feet and made of maple and American cherry. The cherry planks define the maze’s boundaries, and the maple represents the track for Pac-Man and the ghosts. The maze also includes 348 dots made of 1½-inch American cherry dowels, representing the Pac-Dots Pac-Man eats to win the game.
Courtesy of Jerokee Flooring
Courtesy of Jerokee Flooring
Lining up all maze pieces to be accurate to the game was the most challenging part of the floor, Partridge says. “I had all the outline pieces made first and then kind of laid them all out to figure out where they would all go. Then I just filled in the maple from there,” he says. Once the maze was laid down, he drilled all the holes and routed in the cherry dowel pieces for the Pac-Dots. To add a fun touch to the floor, Partridge took pictures of Pac-Man and the Ghost Gang, placed them where there were knots in the cherry borders and covered them with clear epoxy so they could be seen in the floor. “I know a lot of people do the black epoxy on the knots, but I wanted to do something different and kind of play into the Pac-Man part,” Partridge says. He completed the floor by sanding and adding semi-gloss poly.
Courtesy of Jerokee Flooring
Courtesy of Jerokee Flooring
The floor took about 100 hours of solo work from Partridge, but in the end, he accomplished a custom floor design and created a special room for his children. To make the floor interactive, Partridge’s kids had the idea to create pictures of Pac-Man and the Ghost Gang to use on the floor and play a giant game of Pac-Man. Partridge also plans to put wheels on all the furniture so it can be easily moved to play on the Pac-Man floor. The final touch to the room will be a Pac-Man arcade machine Partridge plans to add as a nod to the floor.
SUPPLIERS: Abrasive: Norton | Adhesive: Bona US | Buffer, Edger: American Sanders | Filler: Woodwise | Finish: Absco semi-gloss | Nailer: Primatech | Sander (Big machine): Lägler Hummel | Sander (Palm), Saws: DeWalt
