PTAaron's Movie Room/Game Room/Bar

Let me give you a little idea of the progression of the movie space (I will include full size pictures later when I put up my "work" pictures):

1

My initial setup is here - Harman Kardon 635 and Infinity satellite pictures can be seen in the front of the room with my Toshiba 57" RPTV. At this point the wall to the left was still bare mirrors, nothing on any of the other walls... I had wired my speakers through the drop ceiling to the front wall using monoprice in wall wire and a panel conveniently hidden behind the entertainment center piece on the left. System sounded "ok" - but I had upgraditis... Overhead lighting consisted of 2 large fluorescent fixtures controlled by a switch OUTSIDE the room. A real pain in the butt. All viewing is done with overhead lights off and a light on behind the TV.

2

Here I have upgraded the receiver to a Harman Kardon 3600, speakers are now the Pioneers in the front, and the sub is at the edge of the couch on the left - and it is a Elemental Designs A2-300. It was an expensive month... You can also see that I had to move the entertainment center pieces out - exposing my once carefully hidden wiring panel. I have also added black curtains to the left wall to cover the mirrors to get rid of the light reflections. Lights in the room are now controlled by a X10 switch so I can at least turn them off and on from in the room.

3

In November 2011 I picked up a Mitsubishi 73740 for a steal at Paul's TV on a pre-Thanksgiving sale... notice the appealing milk crate center channel stand! Everything else is pretty much unchanged at this point - you can see the glare of the fluorescent light on the screen.

4

Finally made some "real" progress in January... replaced the 2 fluorescent lights with 6 recessed can lights controlled by 3 Maestro IR switches IN THE ROOM. Also upgraded the surround speakers to Emotiva ERD-1 bipole/dipole speakers... and rewired the room completely moving the equipment to the "shelves" noted in the room diagram and getting rid of the entertainment center pieces.

5

Beginning of March 2012... front wall is "Mouse Ears" black, which was such a huge change! I have am also currently controlling everything via RF - and it is so nice not to have to point the remote at the screen while waiting for everything to turn on! I have even used a "macro work-around" to add in some features like lights dimming when I hit play/coming up slightly on pause/full on at stop...

6

End of March 2012... I have now painted the side walls "Sorcerer's Hat" blue, the trim in the room is now black as are the double entry doors. The mirrors have been removed from the left side wall, and the drywall has been patched with the help of my good friends Carrie and Mat. (Thanks guys!!) This is a dramatic improvement in both the look and the overall feel of the room. Next step is the ceiling - but before I tackle that I will be doing some work on the bar area.

Let me start with some pictures of the space when we first bought it... these are actually shots from the previous owner with the way they had things set up:

This was the way the bar looked:


And the pool table area:


... and this is a really short video I shot of the future movie room when we were checking out the house... I had taken some measurements and wanted a visual record of how things were laid out:

I'll post up some "progression" pictures a little later... I'm kind of slow at this because at the moment my computer is not hooked up - had to move it down into the movie room to run REW, and haven't moved it back up to my office yet.

at about that time we started decorating the bar area/game area as well... here are a few pictures from when we started that - these are from March 2011:
Looking in from the stairs - note the brewing/fermenting buckets from our wine making


Looking into the larger area from the movie room doors:


Looking at the bar:


From bar looking at pool table and wall of my wife's "rock wall" of autographed 80's band stuff:


Looking toward the movie room from the couch by the pool table:

The movie room got some attention in March 2011 too when I picked up some curtains at IKEA and used them to hide the wall of mirrors... they look better in person, the camera flash really shines right through them:


The camera flash really shows the wall behind the curtain, but in normal light you can't really see it.

I also upgraded to slightly larger speakers and a new AVR:




...and a new subwoofer:



...and we added some movie decorations... you can see my Radio Shack SPL meter on the tripod from setting my new speakers

Alrighty... lets just move on through the retrospective view here... moving forward another month to April 2010...

I apologize that I only had taken cell phone pictures at the time - but here is what we did:

1) We put up some glass shelving behind the bar to display my Absinthe collection, our Tequila collection, and the various other unique items (Vince Neil wine, Mick Fleetwood autographed wine, etc):


Next we added shelving along the top of the "back wall" as a place to display our microbrew beer bottle collection:



Here is another shot of the bar area:

Later in November I got some extra $ in the form of a vacation hour cash out at work - just in time to catch a great "Black Saturday" sale at Paul's TV... and picked up a little 73" DLP:


- test fitting it... notice the cat checking out the game collection in the "stand" - this used to be out in the game room area as storage. Just happened to be the right height for the TV.

A little later - I got a center channel stand for Christmas:


...... and a few more shots while playing Skyrim. Unfortunately I happened to choose scenes where the lighting was bluish for all of them, so you don't get a real good idea

With the obnoxious overhead fluorescents on:


Normal viewing with room lights off and only the light behind the screen on:

I started work on carrying out the glorious drawing near the end of January - and took way too many pictures:

Made a new shelf for the built in shelving area that is going to become the equipment rack... this should have been really easy, but it turns out the space is trapezoid shaped, so the shelf needed to be 1" more narrow at the back than the front - simple to fix, but irritating to find out! I assumed the shelf I had brought up to "make a copy of" had just been cut like that on accident.

Here is a shot of the (very cluttered) shelves where the equipment will be going:

AVR will be on the top shelf - I will be putting a fan in the wall on the right side to pull hot air away and into the utility room that is on the other side of the wall.

Then I took on the extremely simple job of installing the gang box for the future can lights. The previous owner had an electrical outlet and a switch that was labeled "neon" on the wall - so I decided to put my switches here. Problem is that they didn't space them out very well - here is the wall marked for a 3 gang box:


... not quite...

Here it is marked for a 4 gang box:


... still not quite... but lets try it anyway:

Nice gaps on either side...

Luckily the cover plate I picked up was "oversized" - so it worked out exactly perfectly!



Here is where that is in the room:


Notice the blank plate at an awkward angle up above the switches? They had a phone jack there... and did a great job of lining that hole up
I will be patching that with the drywall I cut out installing the box - and a poster will be going there anyway so it doesn't matter if my patchwork sucks.

Right now the 2 switches on the right are Lutron IR switches that will control the lights over the door and couch, the space with nothing originally ended up housing an X10 switch before I later picked up a 3rd Maestro...

Just to show how the room looked then - here are a few more pictures...


Left side


I already removed one of the "entertainment center" pieces... looks so unbalanced right now!


Right side

The next weekend my father in-law came over and helped me install 6 can lights - each set of 2 on its own switch.

We got it done quickly with no issues. I haven't taken out the fluorescent panels yet in these pictures.

Finishing up the switches...


MUCH better lighting!! It isn't blindingly bright anymore! ... watching Coolio cook on the cooking channel...


Chessie came down to check out the new lights:



The switch panel as it was initially set up with an x10 switch to control the front of the room set of lights



I had originally intended to do Insteon for lighting control - but decided to save $250 and just buy one more Maestro switch instead.

A few days later I got a nice delivery of toys at work:



We have:
100ft of 14g in wall speaker wire
50ft of RG6 for the subwoofer
25ft high speed rated HDMI cable
3 speaker terminals for the wall (for front speakers)
7.2 "surround sound wall plate"
RCA to "F" adapters
Passthrough plate for wall
...and a RCA keystone jack

All for under $100 shipped! Gotta love Monoprice!!

The next day a trip to Home Depot then Lowes this morning got me another big pile of stuff...
4 double gang low voltage rings
3 double gang decora wall plates
1 single gang low voltage ring
2 keystone wall plates (decora style centers come out)
1 "brush" wall plate (forgot to order 2 pass though plates from monoprice)
1 RCA to "F" keystone connector
...and another maestro IR dimmer switch!



Annoying part is that I could have saved money if I remembered the other plate from monoprice - and also if I had realized Lowes carried the plug I wanted. I usually just go to Home Depot since it is half a mile closer...
Oh well!

More from the end of January:
Looks like my equipment rack threw up all over the floor and the TV got smaller!



Speakers just hanging out...


Test fitting components before I cut any holes...


Finished for that day:


Wires look like a gigantic rats nest... I had planned to carefully lay everything out so it wouldn't look like - but wife's cousin stopped by and took us out to dinner while I was laying things out. I ended up just rushing through just to make sure everything worked - and it did... just happened to pick up a nasty ground loop hum! :foottap:

Don't worry - I cleaned up the wires a little bit...

... and here is a shot of the front of the room from a few days later after I cleaned up the floor and took down the fluorescent fixture:


In case anyone is interested... these are the outlets I installed at the front of the room with speaker wire and subwoofer outlets - there are 2 sub outlets up front just in case... but only one is wired up now:


Behind the TV is this guy here:

The following weekend (first weekend of February) I decided to paint the front wall. I had been planning on doing a dark grey color - but in a shocking turn of events my wife (who has consistently complained that she doesn't want me to make the room TOO DARK) said "Shouldn't you just make it black?" I immediately went to Home Depot and bought a can of Mouse Ears black in eggshell finish!

I ended up spray painting the outlets with several coats of flat black paint after finding out that a brush does not cover them well...


I patched (poorly) the hole where my previous speaker distribution panel was, and gave the front wall the first coat of paint...


Lets just say that if you want BLACK - Mouse Ears is about as black as you can get! Holy ! LOL!

Note the white panel still on the wall - I got lazy... I didn't move the TV earlier when I had the spray paint out - so that panel didn't get painted. I decided to just paint around it. It will never be seen anyway - and if it ends up bothering me I can take some spray paint to it then.

...I ended up doing a second coat the next day because I was seeing quite a few small white specks showing through.

Quick shot of my spray painted outlet covers:


The room with the lights on full - looks dark because the camera set the exposure for the TV... but you get the idea:

You can see I also painted the door to the closet.

Lights dimmed a bit...


.... note that my "behind the TV bias light" no longer illuminates the wall AT ALL... that Mouse Ears paint just sucks up all the light... so I ended up removing it from the setup.