The Theater Which Mercy Built - Page 7

Thanks for the compliment! Yes, Accucal is going to do audio and video calibration both. Jeff is coming over this Wednesday evening. Everything is up and running now finally, The low-voltage installers came in the day before Thanksgiving and were here till 1 am! We had a near disaster trying to get the Prismasonic lens into the projector box - the optics had come unglued from the housing during shipping and while lifting up, the edges ground against the housing and chipped. We heard the crack and my heart stopped. Fortunately, Anssi from Prismasonic came through and immediately shipped me a replacement which arrived on Friday. Got it set up and it looks amazing.

Had a building inspection on Friday, and I have to say that the inspector is a real jerk. He insisted that the contractor put fireblocking in the basement in areas that had nothing to do with the current construction. It's the same guy who inspected the house when it was being built two years ago! Guess he just needs to justify his job. He was a real problem during house construction - kept making us change our drainage plan and outright lied about code (which I called him on and forced him to back down); that cost me thousands and thousands of dollars. He's supposed to come back tomorrow to give final approval. I'm going to stay away lest I say something snarky about who pays his salary.

As for pics, alas, a photographer I am decidedly not!!! I will take some more tonight and see if I can get better ones. Still have some work to do on the door, and frames around the acoustic panels have not been built yet, but hopefully within the week it'll be done done. Right now I'm spending most of my free time building my iRule interface - whew that is painstaking!

Well, he must have been having a good day because everything passed and now we can concentrate on tying up loose ends. The best part is that Mike and Kubby (contractors) hauled off six months' worth of trash and debris out of the basement and vacuumed - our long national nightmare of dust is finally over!! We have put a construction moratorium in or around our house till 2015. Here's a few pics..still have to build frames to go around the fabric panels. The color match isn't perfect, but I think the frames stained in the same color as the rest of the trim will break it up enough so that it won't be noticed. Still need to hook up the HVAC return to the inline fan, and hook up a relay switch to a Nest thermostat for the basement damper zone. Soundproofing is pretty good - with nothing on in the theater, I can still hear the TV upstairs coming down the stairs and through the door. So we're going to try to beef up the weatherstripping around the door, which is two layers of MDF with a 1 3/4 exterior slab sandwiched between. With a movie playing, however, can't hear a thing. I guess I can always put in a second door in the hallway if it really bothers me. I won't let other household members know about that idea.....

It feels great!!! I've got an automatic door bottom fully mortised in the door. Definitely makes a difference, guess I'm looking for perfection

This pic is truer to the actual color. In the earlier pics, I had the flash on and it was a way lighter blue than in actuality. The paint color is Benjamin Moore Stunning. It's a fairly deep navy blue with tinges of grey in it. The GOM is FR701 Blue Plum.

Steal away! Yes, the ceiling is the same color. The stain is much, much less orange than it appears in the pictures. Can't remember off the top of my head what color we used but I'll check later. In the process of calibrating with Accucal right now - picture looks great and working on audio.

So, last item on the agenda is to figure out how to set up a relay between the Fantech and the Nest thermostat. The basement zone is on a damper system with the main floor's furnace (located in basement). There are separate thermostats for the main floor and the basement. I am going to use a Nest thermostat. I know that I need a common wire to power the Nest with the Honeywell zone panel which is attached to the furnace. Right now, the Fantech is wired so that it turns on whenever the furnace turns on. Thus, it will turn on if the main floor thermostat clicks on or if the downstairs thermostat clicks on. I would like it to trigger ONLY when the downstairs thermostat clicks on -- how do I set this up?

Also, at present the Fantech is LOUD. I think the speed is set too high. It is the FG6XL model, which I believe is speed controllable -- can I just hook up a variable speed fan controller up to it to slow it down and still be able to wire the relay as above?

Finally had some time this weekend so took some pics of the completed room. All finished except for some touch up painting and the fan return (see above post). However, the room is quite comfortable temperature wise most of the time even without the return working yet -- probably because someone is getting up and opening the door every 30 minutes or so allowing the warm air to leave the room.

Hallway leading up to the room. Rack is on the left, theater entrance on the right, door to the unfinished basement straight ahead.



Theater entrance:



Rack across from entrance, with door closed:



Rack door open: need to get blanks and a drawer to fill the bottom space.



Rear of rack:



Room pictures:















iRule pictures:

Thanks guys! No stage was mainly done because I didn't want something jutting out close to where the entrance was -- takes away a potential trip hazard. But I do like the clean look too. And it provides a little more floor space -- my son has already camped out there one night!

I made most of the buttons on the left in Photoshop. That part actually didn't take too long, and I'm by no means a Photoshop expert. You can download blank buttons on the iRule sight and import them into Photoshop for editing. They must be saved a .png file in order to import into iRule. The background was downloaded off of the users' section in the iRule builder. The graphical aspect of the interface is pretty easy. The hard part is figuring out conceptually how to place buttons and panels and links and what macros are needed. Timing of macros and entrances do take some forethought but there is also a lot of trial and error. Mine is still a work in progress although at the moment I'm pretty happy with its functionality. Since I'm not a DIY'er when it comes to the construction, this is my way of being able to continue tinkering. The iRule thread here on AVS is really helpful too -- there are guys there who can figure out seemingly anything!

Once I've got the HVAC stuff figured out, I'm gonna turn my attention to decorating the rest of the basement and the hallway leading up to the theater room.