PTAaron's Movie Room/Basement Bar and Game area

EDIT 2/4/11: Finally getting moving on some stuff... looking for feedback and ideas if anyone has any! Please let me know!

We moved into a new house in July 2010 - and it had a great finished basement.

I had posted a thread last year looking for suggestions for my room - and I haven't had the budget to make any of the real changes yet... but I wanted to post up some pictures of the progress so far in "dealing with what I have".

Equipment in the room:
Mitsubishi 73" DLP TV - 73740
Toshiba 57h94 CRT RPTV
Harman Kardon AVR 3600
Harman Kardon AVR 635
Speakers: Pioneer SP-FS51-LR front towers, Pioneer SP-C21 Center, Emotiva ERD-1 surrounds, KLH rears.
Infinity TSS-450 5.1 system
Subwoofer: Elemental Designs A2-300
Sony BDP-BX58 (S580) Blu-ray Player and SACD Player
Motorola DCX-3200 Cable Box
AppleTV2
PS3
PS2
Wii
XBox
Pioneer S810S tape deck

System controlled with Harmony 1100 and RF extender


Here is the overall floor plan of my basement - I obviously forgot to put a door on the bathroom and sump pump room in the plan, but you get the idea



This is how the room originally looked after I started trying to set it up:






...and the best part - a whole wall of mirrors!



My plan is to go through and pull down all of the drywall - and redo it with double drywall/green glue, use clips/channels to decouple from the studs, and double drywall/green glue the ceiling (with decoupling there as well).

Sadly the money I planned to use to get that started didn't come through - sale of a car, and cashing out of a large chunk of vacation time... both fell through... so I had to come up with a "lets just make due" plan.

(continued in next post)

I tossed around a lot of ideas for "taking care of" the wall of mirrors. First obviously was taking down the mirrors - this turned out not to be a good option because they are glued on with a lot of construction adhesive... and that would require re-drywalling and painting the wall. That was outside of the budget range of "about $100".
Another suggestion was to paint over the mirrors - I didn't like that idea because... well it would just look bad.

Instead I went to IKEA and found some very cheap curtains... I ended up stapling one set over the mirrors, then using 2 other sets to cover the wall - adding a pleat at the top to make it look nicer.

Came out like this:


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:



(the blue thing is a Harman Kardon sign - the wires need to be hidden, and that will be done soon, I hope).

As you can see from the front of the room picture - my nice speaker wire panel that was hidden by the equipment cabinet is now exposed ... and again it doesn't look "super" with the overhead lights on and a flash... but when watching a movie you don't notice.

In the near future I am going to pick up some more of those cheap curtains and cover the shelving area (which will be the equipment rack when I redo the room) and the wall behind the HK sign, and do something between the posters.
I also would like to paint the walls a darker color, and maybe spray the ceiling tiles black until I can actually replace them...

In the long term I will be going to a projector and making the front wall into a screen with a false wall to hide the speakers.

So there you have it... Just wanted to share... I'm kind of getting hooked by this hobby! Between this, scuba diving, and collecting watches I don't know how I'm going to get anything else done!

In case anyone is interested... and I'm sure you all are Here are some pictures of the rest of the basement:

Looking in from the stairs (beer making equipment piled to the right... just got done bottling 11 gallons):


Looking into the larger area from the movie room doors:


Looking at the bar (note halloween decoration around bar that I keep forgetting to take down):


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:


Plans for this area: Shelving along the top of the wall to house collection of beer bottles from microbreweries that we are slowing collecting. Display cabinets for my wife's collectables. Shelves behind the bar for my Absinthe collection and my wife's tequila collection. Replace counter tops on bar and sink area behind bar with granite. Wall to the left of bar will be my "rock wall" with my music stuff... and some in ceiling speakers linked to zone 2 of my AVR.
Oh yeah... and a full set of matching chairs for the poker table... I didn't realize how bad that looked until I just looked at my picture

Thanks for the comments!

Yeah... Projector won't come until I redo the room unfortunately
Looking forward to it though!

As far as pool - I'm not a "real" pool player, but I want to be! It gets used a lot when we have parties though. Games would be a nice addition - we have friends with a huge game collection... I would love to do that at some point.

We definitely plan to get old bar signs and decorations! We are looking into a way to install a tap for the beer we brew - because every home bar needs that!

The space is huge - for scale the movie room is 19' on the long dimension and the floor plan is to scale... I forget the dimensions right now. (not at home at the moment).

Do you have any pictures of your setup?

I'm looking at doing some in ceiling speakers for the bar/pool/poker area of the basement. That part of the basement is approximately 24x26x8 not counting the area behind the bar.

I was considering the monoprice 8" 2 way in ceiling speakers to run off the "zone 2" from my H/K 3600. Anyone have any opinions on using these for this size room? I am looking at maybe doing 4 speakers total with 2 over the bar/poker area and 2 over the pool table.

Right now I am REALLY wishing I had kept my old Pioneer stereo receiver that I donated to Salvation Army - that would be perfect for running these speakers...

Great feedback!

Thanks!

The basement was one of the reasons we jumped on this house when we saw it.

I haven't really made any progress with the space, but I did make up some fun movie intros:








I am going to try to do a "Disney" one later this week...

This past weekend we did a few minor projects in the bar/pool area - I didn't get any "quality" photos yet - only cell phone pictures, but I still wanted to share so my thread wouldn't completely die!

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 beer bottles - we have become "beer snobs" lately and have been trying all kinds of different microbrew varieties. We previously had the bottles in the kitchen - which looked very "college dorm." The shelf extends the full length of the back wall and currently contains the beer bottles, shot glass collection, and my wife's "discontinued Pepsi and Coke bottle" collection:



Here is another shot of the bar area:


I will post up better pictures later in the week... but there ya go!

We are looking for a "bar mirror" for between the shelves behind the bar, and also mirrors for behind the bottles. We are also looking for a large "bar sign" or 2 to go on the wall under the bottle display shelves. I will keep the thread updated

Looks like I forgot to put up the "better quality" pics of the bar area... I'll try to get those this weekend! We have picked up a few bar signs and a 3L bottle of Canadian Club to add to the decor - although the bottle serves two purposes since it is full

We also hit a few garage sales a couple weeks ago and scored big in the "movie room decor" area! All for a total of $15 - 2 framed with metal and glass!







...and this one was still in the packaging from Blockbuster for $3:

Oh yeah - in response to the earlier question about being a "real" pool player - I've actually been practicing 3-4 nights a week now after watching some training videos... so I don't completely suck anymore. I have also picked up some minor accessories to add to the "pool area" - like some cone chalk and a wall mount for it (for hands), some cue chalk that matches the felt (was running out of the blue stuff), a new "better quality" cue for myself, and a few other little things. I would like to get a pool table light - but they are all pretty pricy. I'm planning to check if IKEA has something that will fit the bill for a few less bills

We are also going to be having a friend make a dart cabinet for us so we can hang up our dart board. Going for the real "pool hall/bar" feel down there.

Did a little work today - ran rg-6 over to the bar for a tv hookup.
Built a little shelf in the sump pump closet to put the cable box on...


Then I mounted a little 19" LED Vizio behind the bar and re-arranged the bar signs:


For the time being I have an old Jensen IR repeater set up to control the cable box - but it has an external IR plug on the back, just have to figure out where to find the right sensor.
TV is small, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out!

Ah yes, thanks for all the great replies.

Oh wait - no one said anything... My mistake.

Sorry my "space" isn't as cool as everyone else's

Thanks a lot

We had looked at houses on the water, and that was the trade-off... at least in our budget. You have an awesome lakefront house, or a fun basement!

Thanks a lot! Big plans in the works for the bar itself... raising the bartop by about 6 inches, and redoing the surface with hardwood flooring with bar rail around the edges... should be fun when it is done!


LOL! Well... came down to budget We wanted more "house" for the buck, so we got a space that is half a mile from the water instead of right on it.
Thanks though! It is turning out to be a fun project to upgrade.

Real quick shot of the upgrade we did last weekend... 73" Mitsubishi DLP 73740.



This is immediately after putting it in place - so the center channel and "behind the TV light" are sitting up on top of the receiver, and the "stand" still hasn't been cleared out from the game collection it had in it when it was located in the other room...

I really need to do something about my wires - I had installed a panel for the speakers and cable lines to plug into, and it was nicely hidden behind the equipment rack until I got new speakers and had to move the equipment rack! Now you can see it right at the left edge of the TV. I'm considering continuing my "black curtain treatment" around to cover the wires, but that would defeat the purpose of backlighting the wall.
Any thoughts?

A few more shots from behind the bar...

Liquor storage shelves:


The "door" the shelves ... My family is from Germany, and so is my wife's...


Storage behind the bar...


...and just a random shot of my absinthe shelf...

Haha! Thanks!
We collected the booze over the course of 5 years or so... when we moved into the new house a year and a half ago we had 70 bottles of liquor to move, now we have around 110-120 different types. My wife likes to buy different flavored things to try all the time, then the bottles pretty much just sit around. Clearly we need to drink more!

Still tossing around ideas for the rebuild of the bar - we won't be starting that until end of January most likely...

Plan so far is: remove the white bar top. Build the base up another 7-8" using glass block along the back edge so that we can put colored LED lights behind it. On the back of the bar that space will be used to add drawers above the current shelves.
The bar top is going to be hardwood laminate with a bar rail around the edge - we have it narrowed down to a couple of options but Brazilian cherry seems to be winning. The laminate will be covered with a layer of clear epoxy... Which is why we decided to do a laminate instead of real hardwood - it should look the same under the epoxy.
The area behind the bar is going to get repainted with a darker more "bar like" color - and I am looking at getting some dark ceiling tiles for that area too if I can find a way to make it not look strange to have a transition.

Pretty excited ... Got a Wood Technologies CC-12 center channel speaker stand for Christmas.

I'll take some pictures when I get it put together and installed.

Updated pic... With the new stand: