Hi Everyone

I am going to start planning my dedicated home theater room. It's still a ways off but I would like to start working in sketchup to come up with some ideas. I am building on to the side of the house. The room will be roughly 9' wide by 22' long. I have been following the theater for hobbits thread with great interest. I will be starting from scratch. I want to keep the costs down as much as possible. So I will probably have someone frame the room and I will do the rest of the work. I will also be buying all new equipment including a projector, screen, receiver, speakers etc. But by the time I get to that point anything that would be recommended now would be old I would think. So mainly I am just trying to think how the room should be situated. Any ideas would be great! I love this forum!

Jason

Framing is really easy. Safe yourself that cost by doing it on your own and put the money towards hiring a drywall specialist. You can screw up a lot with framing and still have final product look great as long as you have a pro-quality drywall job.

I would also suggest contacting someone like Bryan Pape at Sensible Sound Solutions (http://sensiblesoundsolutions.com/) to assist with designing the acoustics and sound isolation. You could also work with someone local, but unless you want to write some sizable checks and potentially get a complete hack, I would give Mr. Pape a shot.

I would guess that his suggested methods will save me about as much as his fees are (YMMV). It also gives me the peace of mind knowing there is some actual professional influence. Although I've picked some HT knowledge here and there, I have little experience.

Other than that, I would start going through some of the completed build threads here on AVS to develop an idea for your style and approach. I would also jot down many of the issues and mistakes others have made in an attempt to save yourself the hassle.

You mentioned Sketchup and I definitely suggest using that for mockups. I find that it is limited for use as an actual floor plan, but if you are proficient, you can quickly develop different design elements and "test" them out. For floor plan, I just use Visio.

Good luck.

Sketchup is insanely simple and you can probably teach yourself to use it in an afternoon.

I would also suggest contacting someone like Bryan Pape at Sensible Sound Solutions (http://sensiblesoundsolutions.com/) to assist with designing the acoustics and sound isolation. You could also work with someone local, but unless you want to write some sizable checks and potentially get a complete hack, I would give Mr. Pape a shot.

I would guess that his suggested methods will save me about as much as his fees are (YMMV). It also gives me the peace of mind knowing there is some actual professional influence. Although I've picked some HT knowledge here and there, I have little experience.

Other than that, I would start going through some of the completed build threads here on AVS to develop an idea for your style and approach. I would also jot down many of the issues and mistakes others have made in an attempt to save yourself the hassle.

You mentioned Sketchup and I definitely suggest using that for mockups. I find that it is limited for use as an actual floor plan, but if you are proficient, you can quickly develop different design elements and "test" them out. For floor plan, I just use Visio.

Good luck.

Huzzah for these suggestions!

Spend MUCH MORE time on research and study, and less on "what kind of speakers and projectors I'm going to get"....discussions. IMHO these kinds of discussions usually sink to a "my speakers are better than yours" kind of verbiage while studying acoustics and research spent on same is much more valuable.

Also money spent here on acoustical planning and design will be money well spent. Mistakes on speakers, projectors etc are easily correctible-try fixing major mistakes made on acoustical designs cheaply!!

The width (9') seems a bit narrow, but I bet you can make it work.
Enjoy the experience. Sometimes I think the planning and design was almost as fun as the movie watching-well, OK, ALMOST!! :)

Best,
Tom
Chinaclipper

I am a fan of the theater for hobbits thread too. Here is the hobbit everyone knows, Frodo.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/attachment.php?attachmentid=101371&stc=1&d=1202316533

I used SketchUp and after I read through the tutorial, it became very simple to use. Remember to download the extras they have on the sketchup.com. Save your changes all the time as well since if you ever get into difficulty or you aren't happy with a look, you can quickly go back without committing yourself to the design further, having to erase things, or hit the undo button a bunch of times. If you ever get stuck in area, just choose to see the top view and fly back to where you need to be at. It's pretty easy to do and saves time. I can think of plenty of things that would not have been done without having that program.

Thanks for all the replies. I am really looking for how I should lay out the room with such a narrow width.

Hey thanks for the vote of confidence! :D

When I started my thread, I really wanted to show that you can do a very decent room in a really, really small space while still keeping many of the features that make a dedicated HT what it is. So I'm thrilled that folks with 8, 9 foot rooms are being inspired to take it to the next level.

There are a quite a few other smaller-scale theaters here that put mine to shame, if you hunt around a bit. The older Uptown Paradiso and rsprance's just-finished (yay!) Grindhouse immediately come to mind. Lots of good ideas there.

Best advice? Even more so than with a bigger space, plan plan plan. Plan everything. Plan every single inch. Learn how to frame and make use of any "dead space" by planning space-saving features like built-ins, shelves, poster alcoves, anything really.

It might be too early to settle on a projector, but have some sort of idea what kind you want (LCD or DLP? Brand? Price? 1080P or something cheaper) because this will influence your throw distances, seating position, screen size etc. And in a small space, you sort of need to know some of these things upfront, because there isn't much room to tweak afterwards.

Your screen size may be limited by the width and/or height of your front wall. This in turn may influence the type, size and positioning of your front speakers. These things, together with your "tentative" projector will determine your seating position - and in a narrow space, this influences everything around it, since you're barely going to have room to walk around the seats.

So research, research, research - acoustics, projectors, seating, layouts. And then dream, plan and draw before you spend a single penny or pick up a tool.