Basement Layout Room

It's 2 weeks into the basement finish.  The underground pipes for the new bathroom were laid and stud walls have started to go up.  Colorado building code requires basement walls to be built as floating wall.  It's a bit bizarre if you've never seen it before.  However, because of that all of the base plates for the stud walls have been installed, and it's now possible to see the final dimensions of the "train room."

It's perhaps a little hard to tell from the picture, but the room is a slightly odd shape with a diagonal wall in it.

not to scale

Once at the bottom of the stairs, the room basically opens at a diagonal into the layout room.  There is a short hallway leading into the guest bedroom, which is space I have but needs to be kept clear when that bedroom is in use.

With Sn3, the curve radius needs to be kept broad, so there's not a lot of room for interpretation about what space the layout will fill.  I think my strategy will be to build it in phases of about 1/3 the size, leaving the most complicated phase with a free-standing peninsula for the end.

something to this effect at least

I've begun planning the basement finishes today as well.  A trip to Home Depot rendered several swatches to mull over.  My plan is to have the walls finished smooth (not textured) and to paint them a light sky color.

The color quality of pictures taken on my cellphone (where these came from) isn't quite up to snuff, so I'm sure it's difficult to tell the specifics of the colors, but I think I've narrowed it down to Behr "Airy" 550 C-1.  My goal is to avoid something dark, and I want the color to be just a tad lighter than actual sky, without being an overwhelming blue.

Here's a preview from the Behr site.

It's just enough blue to imply it's the sky without looking like a little boy's room.

My goal would be to make it as backdrop-like as possible in order to have to avoid making a real backdrop for the entire layout.  At some points a backdrop of some sort will be needed and I'd rather handle that on a case-by-case basis than try and do something huge and monster like I have in the past.

One of the other things I'm considering (as you can see on the swatch) is the flooring.  I've never though about train room flooring previous to this point.  It's certainly not something I'd spend the time, effort, or money to change if there was already a floor installed.  But since it's being finished and I have to pick I'm confronted with the choice.

At the top level is a question:  What flooring type, carpet or laminate?  For moisture reasons, wood is usually a bad choice for a basement and basements aren't usually high enough traffic to warrant the cost anyways.

Carpet seems nice as it's warm, soft, and very comfortable.  My concern with carpet is maintenance.  While I think I'd enjoy the comfort, it's likely me who will be cleaning it and I don't want it to become a constant maintenance hassle.

Laminate is the other choice, being nowhere near the price or coldness of tile, but having hopefully lower maintenance than carpet, requiring an occasional sweeping with a once or twice a month mopping.  I would probably choose a light to medium toned, natural wood finish, something like Pergo's Young Pecan.

Lastly, for lighting, I think I'm going to go with a combination of things.  Room lighting will be done through recessed can lights, likely on a dimmer.  I actually found dimmable, diffused LED can lights at Home Depot while I was there.

At 3000K temperature they're not quite "daylight" bulbs but they are slightly less yellowy than standard incandescent bulbs.  I'm not 100% sold on these yet, but something like this, with a diffuser, is what I had in mind.

Depending on how the can lights turn out, I may or may not install track lighting to supplement and provide "spot" lights on key scenes.  Though it sounds like extra work, I think primarily relying on diffused room lights with track lighting as supplement will be easier than doing a valance with fluorescent lights.