After moving to Georgia, the wife agreed to let me have half of the garage for my Home Theater. On the good side, the area was 15x17x9, had a 6x6 "Equipt.Room" attatched to the back. The negative was that due to some building compromises (Gee THANK'S Father-in-law!), I was given one window to deal with, and the entry door pushed in 3'x3" into the left front. To balance it out, I had a 3x3 "coke machine/popcorn" closet built on the right front...which left me only about 7-1/2 feet for a screen.

Unfortunately after several false starts, I never got more than the wiring and some of the drywall up before something else more important ALWAYS came up.

Two weeks ago, we had a fire in the garage and everything is either melted, or smoke and water damaged. In the next week the insurance should be settled, and the home theater is going to be back on the front burner, this time with no excuses. Gone will be the entry door pushing in, as well as the "coke machine/popcorn" closet, and the window (yeah!).

I have a few questions before I start laying things out in my head.

1)I plan on going with a "shadowbox" up front to conceal the speakers and the prevent stray light from hitting the screen...How deep should the "shadowbox" be?

2) What would be a recomended viewing distance for a room of this size? Initnally I was planning on going with one row of seats, but do I have room for two?

2)How wide of a screen could I get away with? I'd like to go 2:35 and narrow things with curtains for 1:85 (until I can afford an automated masking system).

Hopefully by this time next week the Barbecue Theater will be well into the drawing stage.

Mike

Cool name to the build. You obviously have a good sense of humor. Hopefully the fire wasn't caused by anything having to do with the theater.

No the fire wasn't caused by anything in the theater. The wife had an old smooth-top range in the garage so she could make candles. The last couple of times she used it, the range started to act up (burners wouldn't work, the fan would cut on and off by itself). Nobody was home at the time, and I got a call at work saying there was a fire. I got the fire marshall's report, and there is no issuance of blame. It could have been worse, but d@mmit, I'm going to make lemon-juice from lemons!

Hi GolferMikeA,

So sorry to hear about the fire, glad it was a small one.

Yeah, rmt ctl OEM type masking is hugely expensive. To get a rmt ctl motorized curtain track which had presets is very costly. Not sure what your budget is for masking ?

This company makes motorized rmt ctl drapery tracks (not automated, just IR ctl'd): www.powercurtain.com

Some AVS'ers (like Vern Dias) say it is a good idea to mount your masking panels on a track close to screen & then mount the drapes on a seperate track in few inches in front, guess this prevents drape folds from rubbing against the screen surface. Others have simply sewn in a 3-4" width of straight edge into a pocket (black velvet pocket?) sewn into the leading edge of the curtain & hunk it all on the same curtain track. Need to keep in mind the amount of drapery "stack back", the space the drapes take up on each side once opened. With a narrow screen wall, some have cured this by using curved tracks to move the excess drape width to the side walls. A thinner more shear drape mt'l should take up less space than bulky mt'l ?

Looking forward to see & hear more about your build.

Hope this helps.

John :D