Birchwood Budget Theatre

I finally started work on my own home theatre. I've been patrolling the forum for a while now, and I have seen lots of amazing theatre designs. I have seen several that are listed as "budget" designs with budgets of $10,000 or so. While I realize that you typically get what you pay for, I am going down the road of trying to get the most bang for my buck.

I will start by saying that I have had a 7.1 system for about 6 or 7 years, but I have never had a dedicated room to truly hook it up appropriately, and I haven't had it hooked up at all for about 3 years. So, I will be using what I purchased from Circuit City long ago. Not the top of the line gear, but better than a HTIB from Wal-Mart. So, here's a run down of my equipment:

Harmon-Kardan AVR235- to be replaced since it does not have HDMI switching
Infinity Primus 250 Fronts
Infinity Primus c25 Center
Infinity Primus 150 Surrounds/Rears
AT&T U-Verse Cable Box
XBOX 360
Optoma HD20 Projector

As I said, I had all of this stuff setting in the basement, sadly not in use. The exception to that being the projector- I purchased it off of Woot for $650 a year ago, or so.

That wraps up my introductory post. I'll follow with existing and proposed plans.

Post Number 2:

The existing basement is low, and long and skinny. I only have about 7'-3" of ceiling height. The room that was finished in the 70's is about 10'-8" long, and 25'-0" long. So, the existing room proportions are tricky. Also, there are two columns with a beam running down one side of the room- the bottom of the beam is at 6'-9". Here is the existing room (prior to demolition):



The columns are shown with red dots. My goal was/is to have a 100"+ screen and a room that will seat up to 8. Here is the design I cam up with:



I tried to work with the columns as best I could, and I located the screen between them, which limited my width, but I'm still close to a 102" diagonal, which I'm ok with. This set up blocks both of the windows out of the actual theatre room, and creates "intimate" seating for eight. There is only about 40" of width for two people, so the idea is that 4 couples could sit down there, or 4 guys could each have a wide seat for watching sports, or playing XBOX.



Here are a couple of preliminary renderings of what it might look like inside:





Thanks for viewing, comments are always appreciated.

Progress. I had already begun demo/construction when I started this thread, but I didn't have my pictures at that point. I dragged pictures onto my computer so I'll update this with some progress pics. I laid out my sill plates for the walls, then I wanted to make sure my planned distance would work with where I want my screen wall to be. I temporarily hung a sheet just so that I could check the screen size and ability to focus properly.

Once the screen wall location was verified, I constructed that wall, and meticulously got to work on the drywall. I am planning on using the SilverFire paint on a drywall wall as my screen, so I spent lots of time sanding and making the wall as smooth as possible before priming.





All of the theatre walls are now framed. I again tested the projector location and screen size/focus just to be 100% sure that everything was going to work out. I ended up hanging the projector upside down so that I could mount it higher on the wall. The screen size is going to work out to be approximately 92" diagonal. So, smaller than I originally planned, but plenty big for my relatively short viewing distance.

Thanks for the additional input Tim. That would definitely be an option- especially for the rear surrounds.

Thanks for the feedback. I am an architect and I wanted something a little different. The typical layouts usually have expensive seating and trim that I can't afford, so I am hoping to make up for not having that with a more dynamic layout.

I set up the system and ran a prelim trial. You were right- the speakers being that close was a bit obnoxious. I relocated the rear surrounds as suggested and raised them to above ear level. It made a big difference. I'll have to play with it a little to get the side surrounds farther away, but I think I can. I wasn't originally planning on making the top portion of the wall AT fabric, but I think that might look cool, anyway. Thanks for the tips.