It has been a life long ambition of mine ever since, as a little boy, I was taken by my father into a gun room on one of the estates he worked on as a stalker, I was captivated, surrounded by all those Holland & Hollands, Purdeys, Mannlicher Schoenauers, BSAs and Parker Hales gleaming in their racks along with the smell of gunoil and tow.
I knew then that I would collect guns and one day have a gun room of my own where I could sit and enjoy my collection (handloading was a thing unkown to me those 40 years ago).
Life passes and we live through all its phases and I suppose that when we get to our 50s or so and the family is grown up, you can get back to doing some things purely for your self.
Creating a gun room has been on my agenda of things to do for a few years now and I'd looked at several options of where to locate it in the house but none had been really suitable and would have been half measures at least.
However when our daughter announced that she was leaving home then a suitable opportunity arose, and before she had even thought of packing her bags I had started work on the process.
Now I could have more than just a room to hold my guns I could also relocate my reloading benches and my office area into a joined up layout that would meet my needs and then some.
When we built an extension onto our house 20 years ago we built a studio onto the back which I shared with my wife, a practising artist, as my workshop and reloading haven, pictures of which have appeared on these forums in the past. This meant that my wife would also gain extra space and have the workshop to herself when I vacated to the gunroom, a win/win situation which did help with domestic harmony as creating a gun room wasn't going to be cheap.
In the UK the home office lays down guidance as to the levels of security that is required for the retention of firearms in both domestic and commercial environments.
In order to create a gun room in which I could display my current collection in racks rather than in the 8 steel cabinets it was currently housed then I would in effect need to convert the room into a gun cabinet, this would require hard works to make the room secure to the accepted standard. As I also have ambitions to increase my collection and increase the number of slots on my ticket I would need to heighten my level of security by having a dedicated monitored alarm system installed for the gun room as well.
The first step in the process was to get the police down for a site meeting with the steel fabricator and the alarm people to go over my plans and agree the specifications as I wanted to ensure that I didn't get any surprises down the way about things being installed and then deemed not suitable. I have to say that both the police officers involved in this project were most helpful, entered into the spirit of it and were full of good sound practical advice that made the job better and saved me a bob or two as well, as this project was new to the fabricator and the alarm people as you don't get many gunrooms built nowadays in Britain.
Anyway the job went well with the hard works going in first, steel door, frame, locks and window bars. I put the steel mesh up to secure the partition wall myself, no big job. The alarm installation also went well until it came to connecting the alarm to the monitoring centre via the phone line, there was fault but BT the line supplier was adamant that there wasn't, it took me two weeks to get a BT engineer on site with an alarm engineer to sort the problem out and yes there was a line fault which BT had to fix, don't anyone tell me that the privatisation of the utilities in this country has led to better service my experience has been consistently the opposite.
Having got it all resolved I got sign off a week last Friday and I've been getting my guns and stuff back from storage, thanks Joe, and filling the racks. The racks and benches had all been put in earlier when the hard works were being done along with shifting my stuff out from the studio.
The gun room is off a small bedroom that I now have as an office with the computer, books etc and I can do my research with my guns to hand, heaven. This is the office:
Steel door to gun room on the left:
Door to gunroom:
Now we enter Aladdins cave, well it is to me at least:
Handloading bench with presses, components and stuff:
Rest of the bench and more stuff:
Lube sizing and work bench, the box in the foreground under my range bag is the BP container:
The door into the gunroom:
In the racks the reasons for this all
:
. The upside is working for a Section 5 dealer. 
