Adam's HT Build. Bring on the Chaos!

Okay. I have been using AVS forums for years, albeit off and on. I have the green light to go ahead and finish my entire basement, which will include a guest suite, bathroom, fitness area, large open play area, and a HT. The dimensions of the HT are 17' 5' wide by 18' 8' deep. I can do deeper if need be, but not wider. Unfortunately, the guys that build the house tried to make things somewhat difficult for me, and I already have issues coming up. Here's the first string of questions related to the planning stages.

My house was build with ibeams for joists. They are basically 2 2x4's with a slit in them and them some plywood looking material making the vertical part if the I. These are spaced at 16".

The first issue is that there are plumber pipes, gas lines and a HUGE HVAC thing running perpindicular to all the joists. They are pinned to the bottom of the joists, running perpindicular (which saved them time and made a HA for me). Most of the pipes and gas lines are small....so, here is question #1:

1) Can I use some sort of Hat and decoupling system to lower the ceiling about 1.5 from the existing joists, leaving room for the pluming and gas lines? I know that these systems are not cheap, but moving the gas line alone....oh I can only imagine what that would cost.

Second issue is the seating issue. I want 2 rows of 3 chairs. I have lots of room across for these, but depth wise I am concerned. I read that I should have the front row 2x the screen size in distance. For my 100" screen, that would mean over 16 feet out and the room is only 18' 8' deep to begin with.

2) Does the x2 rule still apply when there are more than one row of seats? I made a tape mock up on the wall of 100 inch screen and 16' back seemed really far back for row #1.

3) I have a big old HVAC run that runs the length of the house. It is on the theater ceiling as depicted below by the double line. Circles can be ignored. Spaced don't work for the ascii image.


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Should I just move the N face down so the HVAC is behind the wall, for simplicity sake and a give up those 24"? That would take the room down from 17'5" to 15'5" but would make framing easier. I could gain back the space if I used a Hanging Interior Soffit.

More questions to follow.

The room ceiling is an odd height. I measure 7' 8" from concrete floor to bottom of the joists.

Here is my sketch up diagram:

If I want to hide my dipole speakers in columns, do I just make a column where the top part is open and covered in speaker cloth? I searched the forums and could not find much on columns other than for those that wanted to place DIY speakers into those columns.

I took a long hard look at the gas pipe line and I think I can move it myself. Its already a flexpipe (looks like a thick yellow garden hose) and there is a simply kill valve and I have enough slack I think to reroute it the right way.

I have three plumbing lines and I am certain I can do that myself.

The big issue I have now is the HVAC line. I really want to decouple this room bu building a "room in a room" and I just don't see how that's possible with the way the HVAC run is situated. The line is made of what feels like very thick cardboard. The part of the run in the theater area has 3 seperate lines that come off it. Its flat up against the Ibeams, so using a Soffit just does not seem like it would work. Before I post this I will make a picture in sketchup and if anyone has any ideas, I'm all ears. I am about to just place the wall ahead of the HVAC and loose those 30 inches. Its 30 inches in the width, not the depth, and even without the 30 inches I still have ~15 feet.

Well, I think after 3 hours of messing with Sketchup and staring at joices I think I have it. As a previous poster suggested I CAN use a soffit to cover the HVAC. The hard part was that in order to make a box within a box, I will need to lower the HVAC about 1 inch to give my new "internal joists" (not sure what else to call them) sufficient clearance. The HVAC is held up with pices of fabric nailed to the joists, so lowering = easy. The existing joists are 12" tall to I can easily place in 2x6 or 2x8 to make the span of 17 feet. I'm pretty sure I need 2x8's, but the load calculators don't do well with stuff that has 0 for one of the weight variables.

Finally, I managed to get 5 chairs AND a bar into my "tiny" room. What do you think of this design. Double pocket doors in the back.

Here it is in pic form.

Well, I'm moving forward. Moved a few pipes around since my last post. Had a General Contractor give me a bid for the whole basement. I felt the bid was VERY high or I'm very cheap or both. I had a HVAC guy out today. My plans did get changed as well from above. I now have a plan I am VERY happy with. You will see the bars are now on the sides, since they are really only going to be used when there are sports on the screen. Therefore, being off to the side seemed more approp. I also swapped pocket doors for French doors per Ted's advice.

I got all my stuff from the SoundProofCompany. Can't say enough positive things about that experience.

I bought my hat rack today and got very confused. I got the 25g stuff but measured across the bottom of the rack and it was 2.75". I called the guys at Soundproofing and explained that the clips seemed to fit really well on the rack. I now believe, that this 2.75" is inaccurate and is the results of the hat itself being "smushed" while on the rack. If I apply pressure to the side of the hat, it measures ~2.5 when the verticle parts of the hat are in fact verticle. Take a look at the below pics and see if you think it fits well. They are kind of fuzzy because my camera does not like close ups.

Thanks fotto. I value your opinion since you went through so much with your channels. I went down this morning and took a digital caliper to the track and made measurements down its length. The average across was ~2.6" so I think I am okay. I knew the WC looked like it was seated right, and could not understand why my tapemeasure was saying 2.75". I think maybe I should have spent more than $3 on a tape measure.

It looks like I might get my way and end up doing a lot of the work myself. I am working on an electrical layout. The issue I have is how to calculate estimate how many amps a given circuit is pulling. I know that each 100W bulb pulls less than 1 amp, but how do you decide how many outlets you can daisy chain together when you are not sure how many amps are going to be going into those outlets at any give time.

My basement will have the following rooms:
1) Bathroom
2) Bedroom
3) Kitchen (with microwave, mini diswasher, a 2/3 sized fridge, and a pump to push the water into my plumbing rough in)
4) Family room
5) Theater

I only have a few circuits left in my breaker box. I might need a sub panel I guess. I figure that I will have the following needs:

1) Bathroom - 1 fan/light fixture, one light over the bathtub, and a light fixture over the mirrow, and regular outlets

2) Bedroom - 4 recessed 6" cans and regular outlets (one of which will have a 40" LCD hooked up to it)

3) Kitchen - 4 recessed 6" cans, plus wiring for the microwave, mini diswasher, mini fridge, water pump and outlets

4) Family room - 6 recessed cans and outlets

5) Theater - 4 recessed 6" cans, 11 recessed 3" cans, Receiver, DVD, computer, projector, 2 subs and outlets.

Where can I go learn the best way to wire all these up? I understand the concept of wiring and have some experience, but I want to make sure I do it right.

Humm....that's a really good thought. I might be able to convince someone to do the plans and then I can do all the grunt work.

Just updating my thread as I have some prices starting to come in. A friend of mine has agreed to frame the entire basement (not including sofits) and break up a 8' by 1' section of my concretre floor to run a pipe. This pipe will tie into my existing bathroom rough-in and will be the drainage supply for the kitchette sink and dishwasher. He has agreed to a price of ~2600, which includes all materials and labor. I'm thinking that's pretty good and will provide me with a framwork to work off of and keep me busy for a while.

Actually, he would probably do the western shore if you paid him for travel time, which might still result in a pretty big savings. My basement is 1300-1400 square feet, so its not a in insignificant amount of labor we are talking about.

(I sent an email off to the sound proofing company, but am also posting here for alternitive points of view.)


I heard back from my HVAC guy. We came up with a plan that will hopefully be the lesser of all evils.



As you can see form this picture, there is 14" tall ductboard presently. You can see how the ductboard runs about 12" out from the edge of the R wall. Our plan is to cut the existing ductboard, replace with metal, and put in 2 elbows right above the chair in the foreground. This will joggle the new duct into the wall/ceiling corner, rather than having it run 12" out from the wall. We will use an 8" metal duct (rather than the existing 14") which will gain us some headroom back. We will then use flex duct to run R->L through the ibeam joists to place the "blowers" all the way on the L side wall. This should cut down on noise getting into the duct work.

The estimates he gave me includes placing 1" installation around the outside of the duct to muffle the noise.

1) Is that a sufficient amount of installation?
2) Does it matter with this setup, whether I place the duct "inside" or "outside" the envelope? i.e. Whether I drywall first and then bring in the duct (duct is inside the envelope) or whether I soffit around the duct and then drywall, leaving the duct outside the envelope? I'll be using whisper appropiately in either case.

Thanks.

-Adam

Okay. I'm just plain giddy. I talked to Ted White today and he explained why the HVAC design by my HVAC guy was not satisfactory. So I sat down there for ~90 min starting at the walls and the ceiling...waiting for lightning to strike. I've always said that thinking outside the box will solve most problems. Well, I came up with an HVAC solution that I have never seen posted here, and am doing sketeches of it now. I have never seen HVAC done in this way before, so I will either endup becoming famous or there is a really BIG hole in my logic. Pics to come!!!!

Here is the plan. The plain gray is false sofit. The striped gray is HVAC. The striped gray is outside the DD+GG envelope. This is a basement in the NE (delaware) so cooling is a minor issue vs keeping it warm in the winter.

The hot air comes in through the duct. At the column on the L (picture left) there are two "exits" from the duct, one straight up and one straight down. Both emply into flexduct. The down exit goes into flexdict encased in insulation, encased in a column made of double plywood + GG. At the bottom of the column is an exit to under the stage. The flex continues in a serpentine path to the floor mounted exit.

There is another line that runs in the joist space. This will be outside the DD+GG envelope. It pierces that envelope on the R side into the "false soffit" and follow a similiar path as on the L.

I will add 2 more colums for returns and use a similiar technique for those once I figure out where to place those columns.

I think this just might work. Any sound bleed into the vent will just go into the area under the stage where it can't do damage!

Since the HVAC run will be "boxed out" in s sofit before the drywall goes up, it will be outside of the envelope. The take off from the HVAC main run will be up out of the main run into the joice space (also outside the envelope) and will then run acorss the joice and finally punch through the envelope after turning downward on the other side of the room.

On a side note, I thought on this overnight and figured out that a better design is to have the verticle runs of flexpipe in the rack closet. I will basically just shift the columns that house the flexpipe into the rack room, thereby keeping my walls flat (ie no columns). I was worred that my dipole surrounds would not play nicely with columns.