My Basement Sim Build

Last year my wife and I were fortunate enough in our lives to be able to design and build our forever home in Northeast Ohio. We used a local custom home builder and designed the entire floor plan ourselves. One of those custom things was a spot in the basement to be able to put a golf simulator. The main purpose of the sim is to keep hitting balls in the winter when a foot of snow is on the ground and to have friends/family over for drinks and golf.

The basement has 9’ ceilings and the “pit” is a 1’ step down. The dug-out section is 10’ wide by 15’ long and is 2’ off the foundation walls. I’m 6’3” so for me to swing a driver without hitting the ceiling I needed all of the 10’ ceiling. Because we did this from the start in our planning, our builder only charged us an additional $500 to have this done.

All in I’ve spent around $3k on materials, launch monitor, and software subscriptions to get it all up and running.

A few random notes:

-Currently using an OG SkyTrak I bought used on eBay and run E6 from an old iPad I had. My goal is to get a gaming PC in the next year so I can cancel my SkyTrak+ and E6 subscriptions when they come due and run GSPro from a PC.

-Pretty much everything else is from Amazon (golf specific stuff) or Home Depot/Lowes (AstroTurf, hardware, pvc, etc).

-The hitting net is 10’x10’x10’ with a 10’x10’ impact screen in front of it. The projector is mounted on the ceiling behind the hitting area and because it’s high up there isn’t an issue with a shadow on the screen.

-I hit 10’ from the screen and have 5’ behind me. No issues with clubs hitting the back of the dug-out area.

-The sides of the sim and behind the impact screen have high density foam along the bottom in case there’s miss hits and worm burners to reduce a ricochet. The floor joists in the hitting area have pool noodles on them and the net also covering them. The lightbulb is plastic, but I’ll probably just remove it to help with the projector.

-I hung curtains around the walls of the sim and workout area. Helps the unfinished basement look a little better and improves with the sound reverb from concrete walls. You can hear the sim upstairs, so there’s no golfing when someone is trying to sleep, but it’s not really too loud.

-This is our forever home and I have no plan to ever sell this house. I get that something like this might hurt re-sale value, but when I have no plans to ever move and will probably die in this house, I don’t really give a shit.