Ah, home theater... I've been thinking of converting over part of our basement to a small home theater and office for some time but the cost and PITAI (the Pain In The Ass Index) was way too high to tangle with it. Plus our basement was full of garbage to the ceiling anyway so it was kind of a moot point.
Along comes Craig's List and suddenly all the garbage has been finding it's way going out the door to folks who seem to think they want it. With the exit of piles of this stuff, including the old pool table we never used, we had a nice 13x19 room at our disposal. Perfect.
Looking into all the components I'd need, turns out we could do this whole thing soup-to-nuts for under $2000. Not too bad. And for the first time ever we actually brought the project in under budget! Unbelievable...
(click on the thumb nails to get a larger image)
| The always-popular before picture. I think we've played maybe 3 games of pool on that table before it became a giant shelf/work bench. What you see here is _after_ a bunch of cleaning had taken place. |
 |
| Step one after removing all the junk from the room and getting rid of the pool table was to put up a stud wall in front of the concrete so we can run some wires and button things up nicely. This is a shot of me using the fabulous rented hammer drill to drop anchors into concrete. That thing was smoking hot after I got done - power of Home Depot tool rentals... |
 |
| Pretty snappy looking wall if I do say so myself. |
 |
| The next step was to run a dedicated circuit off the power box for this wall - since we also wanted to put an office down here with several computers and such, I wanted to make sure it had all the power it'd need without worrying about tripping any fuse - fortunately the main power box is just on the other side of the wall from this room so it was a nice short run. I hit my favorite Home Depot tool rental place again and got a "Hole Hog" and went nuts putting holes in the studs and header for all the electrical, sound and video cabling I needed to run. |
 |
| After looking into all kinds of options, I went with a projector -
the cost per inch of screen space is tiny compared to plasma/LCD and
it's much more space efficient than a rear projection model. While
I've moved away from Dell computers of late (I'm an AMD man these days),
they _do_ have a nice price on their MP 2300 projector which is very
nice - $1100 after rebate and the specs are great (good
brightness/contrast/throw distance). It looks excellent, I'm
pretty pleased with it all in all. Running in Eco mode (not as
bright) you're supposed to be able to get 3000+ hours out of a bulb - I
guess we'll see. I went ahead and mounted it in the joists and ran video cable out through the studs to the front of the room. |
 |
| Taking the temporary setup for a spin - check out the fab 70s orange chair from my childhood and Heidi's awesome library chair she got at a thrift store. The desk I'm at came off Craig's list, as did several items around our house of late. |
 |
| Watching the Mariner's get hammered on a 6 foot wide screen
somehow makes it less painful. I went with el cheap'O DeLite
screen ($70) like you'd find in a typical elementary school classroom.
It looks fine but it's not the smoothest going up and down - if I had to
do it again I'd probably spring a few extra bucks for a nicer model. The nice milk carton/plywood setup there for the sound system is nifty looking I must say... |
 |
| another Craig's List find - 91" long console there is perfect and we
swapped a printer stand for it, believe it or not.
We went with the Yamaha 5.1 theater setup with separate DVD unit - ($439 on sale). Sounds great in this small space - I'm sure audiophiles will take exception to not spending thousands on a sound system and bi-wired speakers etc... but these are deeply unhappy folks in general and just need to get on with their lives. |
 |
| Then we ran Component, composite, S-Video and sound cables through
the walls. Figured we might as well run them all as long as the
wall is open. Ram Electric had good prices and the right lengths
for the job, but it took a while for them to get me the stuff which was
a bummer. I also ran 5 drops from the 10/100/1000 switch in the closet down to the new room for phone and network access. Gotta have enough connections for game-night, after all... |
|
| Put some nice "finish mounts" on top of plastic electrical outlet boxes for my sound/video connection points at the front of the room. |
 |
| Mostly for style points and sound dampening we put in insulation for the walls and ceiling. |
 |
| Then up went the dry wall. We considered a hanging ceiling or some sort of other system for the ceiling but ended up just dry walling it, too - cheaper and gives a more finished look. |
 |
| Ah, the joy of mudding and taping - Heidi did all the heavy lifting here while I was at work or sleeping. Score for me. |
|
| The (mostly) finished product - we put down some carpet pad and a
nice low pile carpet with finished edges (i.e. we rolled it out, it's
not wall-to-wall) which gave things a nice feel in the room. We're
going to put strips of wood up on the ceiling instead of mudding so we
can get up there if we need to - plus Heidi's going to do a nifty
"thatch and weave" pattern with the strips that'll look cool as opposed
to a giant, flat ceiling with nothing on it.
The couch was another fabulous Craig's List score Heidi snagged - gotta love the CL... Check out my fab new dual LCD monitor setup with the cool "gull wing" monitor stand - my new favorite thing. If folks ever wonder where their tools come from, most of them happen right there. Feel the magic...
|
|
Total project cost:
Projector - $1100
Sound System - $439
Screen - $70
Cabinet for theater components - $0
Lumber - $64
Tool Rentals - $55
Cables/wiring/connectors/outlets - $130
Dry wall, paint, primer - $120
Total=$1978. give or take. Of course there's also the couch, carpet, pad, office desk and such - but that was all going in regardless so I don't include it with the media center installation as such. Hey, if Enron and MCI can do it, I can cook my books, too...
Return to the About Me page