So me and the misses are currently looking at houses. We've only looked at 2 houses thus far (ottawa, ontario) but I've been horribly dismayed at the super-tiny sizes of the basements we've seen. The more I look online the more I see this is the norm for the location we are looking at in our price-range. This is of course ontop of stupid things like the stairs opening up to the middle of the room, basements that look designed for multiple rooms, weird ceiling heights, odd shaped rooms (long but skinny, cramped L and U-shaped etc...)

Does anyone know what the minimum dimentions would be for a comfortable home theater? I know this is a generalization but maybe I can elaborate by listing what I was hoping to do:

- Front projector (2.35 if possible, 16:9 if I must)
- 2 rows of theater seating (4 front, 4 back)
- Room for an isle on both sides of the room to access seating
- 7.1 (no large complaints with 5.1)
- Room-within-a-room would have been super nice but failing that, some degree of isolation would be required

Not trying to do anything fancy or elaborate - just need to know the estimated minimum dimentions to throw 8 seats and a projector into a room without the speakers being right next to anyone's ears.

Anyone with theater building experience care to chime in?

based upon your seating requirements, you could get something fairly narrow like Berkline 088 seats. You could get 4 sets of a Recliners+single arm recliners. They are 59" wide, so that would be 59x2=118" + aisle width. I think acoustically, it's also best to not have any seats jammed against the wall, to maybe have 12" of spacing. Now we're up to 142" + aisle width, so maybe 176", or 14' 9". Add on top of that any construction space required (staggered studs, double sheetrock, RSICs, etc, so you could be looking up to 16' wide, which is fairly substantial given the fact that you say that all of the basements are odd shaped.

My HT is only 135" so I can only do 3 seats with an aisle down the side. I have a relatively large basement (1500 s.f.), but given the configuration, that was the widest I could go.

Thanks for the reply!

Seeing as most of the homes I'm seeing are 13' on average and odd shapes I think I might have to compromise to 2 rows of 3 seats but better to have an awesome small space than a compromizing large one I suppose.

It's funny - looking at these threads and visualizing what I wanted in my head ended up being significantly different than I think is possible unfortunately. Maybe the house hunting ends up being awesome but this was definiately the info I needed. Thanks!

Well that was quick... looks like we may have found the house we plan to move into - much nicer/bigger than anything we've seen thus far. Also has the largest basement I've seen thus far but it's still not "ideal":

- Room shape (the usable shape anyway) is an "L"
- Dimentions are 23' x 10' for one area which connects directly to a 10' x 9' space
- Attached is a VERY rough diagram

Clearly I'm width-deprived but still the largest I've seen and probably expect to see. Seem like a workable space? My only concern aside from width is that the stairs open up to the largest workable area :/

Edit: An offer was placed before we could get our offer in, go figure :(