Anatomy of a Skate House

The skate house. If you read this thing, you have probably lived in one or hung out in one. The skate house is at once a fascinating and disgusting place. full of character and weird novelty but sketchy and most likely unsanitary at the same time. I happen to live in a skate house. It's my skate house, and i kinda like it this way..mostly. I wish we would keep up on housekeeping a bit better, but with a bunch of guys around who collect seemingly endless pieces of "found art", coping blocks, tools and junk stacked everywhere.. it's a pipe dream. Far too many projects and far too little time to finish even half of the ones we start. heres a primer of a modern skate house dissected for your enjoyment and/or horror.

This is SkateBlock. This is what you'll see as you first approach the compound.



This is how you know you have arrived. All skate house mailboxes look similar to this.




The foyer. a fancy way to say "dumping station for wayward project crap". Most basic necessities for skate house life can be found with 10 feet of the front door. here we have some typical examples of those needs. Nearly every base is covered here with things like a half dozen cans of spray paint in a bucket, ceramic tiles, extension cords, saws, curb paint, car jacks, skateboards, tiny bicycles, impact drivers, mud boots and rain boards.



The front room will usually serve as a meeting place and will be the most often destroyed room in the skate house. It will also have many, many interesting doodads and suprises to explore. Most random objects in a skate house will find their way to window sills, and mantle pieces in the common rooms.






Skate videos are integral to a skate house common room. It will be the predominant and often only usage a television will get.


The living room will always have piles of magazines, too. It is also likely that the magazines will be ordered and tidy, no matter how badly the rest of the room is thrashed.


A proper skate house has nearly every wall covered in some bullshit or another. random objects, shitty records and old skateboards are common themes.








The time sucking corner. Obviously. You will often find the denizens of the skate house clustered around a game of Skate 2, trying to slam as hard as electronically possible.


the kitchen will usually be a biohazard, and the fridge will be empty of everything save condiments and beer. As you can see we are slippin' on the beer situation, but have condiments on lock.





The computer stations in a skate house will be cesspools of burrito wrappers, beer cans,and general garbage. We use these things to look at skate photo's, porn, Epic'ly Later'd, and to set up skate sessionswith other nerds. who cares if it's clean, nah'mean?




The bathroom...ugh, ok..just use your imagination and be assured that it's probably worse than that.


It takes a roughneck to live in a skate house for any lenghth of time and you will be tested now and again, but the endless entertainment value of having your homeboys around all the time to freak out on shit with you while having minimal rules about how to spazz out...is just simply awesome.
Long live the skate house.