Please help with my basement design.

We are in the midst of renovating a house we just purchased.

The basement has finished bedrooms, bathrooms and closets, but the rest of it is finished as one massive room, approximately 31' x 35', less a stairway and mechanical room.

I am proposing to cut up the massive room by framing out a fitness room, leaving the rest as a media room and games area.






We would like to put a pool table and/or ping pong table in the games area. Possibly a card table. Did I mention my wife is a Mrs. Packman addict ? Maybe a video game as well.

That leaves a space of about 13' 6" x 18-20 feet as "media room" space. We don't watch enough movies to want a dedicated theatre room. We want a room where people can be just as comfortable hanging out as watching various media, though when they are watching media we want it to be a high quality experience.

I have no AV equipment except a JVC RS45 projector. We really like it, but could probably be persuaded to replace it with a very large high quality display.

The basement has 9 foot ceilings throughout except for an HVAC duct about 12 feet from the basement wall end of the media room. There is about 8 feet under the beam, so headroom shouldn't be an issue, even if the projector has to hang under it.

The basement has in floor heating, so its warm and comfy all year round. Humidity is well controlled as well.

I realize that light control will be an issue, though luckily the RS45 has a fairly bright image. We could use black out blinds on the windows as necessary. I presently have the RS45 in a similar (worse, actually) room and am familiar with the drawbacks.

Sound will, of course, make its way up the stairway to some extent. We are prepared to live with that.

I have drawn the fitness room as having french doors opening to the front of the media room. If I didn't do that, the fitness room would feel like a cave. Its not ideal that they open into the media room at that position, but I don't have much control over it.

What say ye of my proposed basement layout ?

How would you finish the games and media room out ? Carpet, flooring, walls, colors, ceilings, lighting etc.

Any special wiring, other than cat 5 and HDMI to the projector and copper to each of the speaker locations ?

Thanks !

Is this better ? Google downsizes them in Picaso, which is what I use.

basement layout1.jpeg 104k .jpeg file

media room layout 1.jpeg 50k .jpeg file

Thank you for taking an interest !

Thanks for putting up with that.
Yes.

There is no hard wall between the media area and the games area. Its kind of where the couches end and where other stuff takes up space. Other stuff = pool table, arcade game, etc. The media room in our present house is about 15 x 21, but part of the 15 feet is a walk way on the side to get to another room via a door beside the screen. So I figure that 13.5 feet should be a tolerable width for the media room in the new house. ???
Not sure about that. I was going to put in ceiling speakers for sound from the media server/ amp. I was hoping for real rear surround speakers suspended from the ceiling, maybe free standing.
I wouldn't expect the bar and games area to be lit when we are watching movies. Yet the RS45 seems to do fairly well in a semi lit area. Certainly the screen area has to be as dark as you can make it.

I'm looking for guidance on paint schemes/lighting to pull this off. Pot lights at the front of the media area on a separate dimmer and then 2 or 3 lighting zones as one goes back ? My current media room has whiteish walls and they are terrible. This room needs to be black for the first 8 feet ????
The stairs are entirely in the "framed off" area. Anything not in the border is landing, ie on the basement floor. The stair case is curved. The reason its so long is that the basement has 9' ceilings, plus the joist thickness = 10' plus of risers.
There is a closet as part of the stairway/ mechanical room that I haven't outlined. We are working with a designer and she recommends leaving the space you identified open. I'm not sure where I will locate the equipment rack. The amps for the house (multi zone) and receivers will be buried in one of the closets along the bedrooms. Not sure which one. Will run a conduit there (and elsewhere around the house). Not sure I want an equipment stack in the media room. Looking for direction here too !

As far as I can tell, all my media will be served via a Linux DLNA server and XBMC or mythTV. The amps for the house will be centrally located. Presently all the speak wiring goes to the great room on the ground level, but I think I'll relocate that to the basement via another conduit.

As you can tell, I'm still trying to figure a lot of this out.

Does anyone know of pictures of a game/media room layout like I am planning to do ? Specifically the bar counter behind the couches separating the games area from the media area ?

My wife is thinking that the wall between the closet kitchen and the games room would be the counter part of the bar. We'd probably close it in with shutters between the counter and the ceiling when its not in use and enter the space via the door.

I have to do a bit more planning in this area.

I guess this is the sort of layout we are after, assuming that we are standing at the screen end of the room.

http://www.houzz.com/photos/63642/Kukio-tropical-living-room-hawaii

Thanks for the replies guys. Very helpful. We are tearing the house apart at the moment. I'll review and get back with my comments.

FYI, I widened the media room from 13'6" to 17 feet. It allows us to space the seating (couches, generally) wider, giving everyone a front row seat. Before we did this, our seating plan would have had 2 rows of seating, pretty much necessitating a riser under the second row.


Making the media room wider reduces the width of the fitness room to 18 feet, but we feel that will still be adequate.

I'm just framing the area right now, while we are doing major renos on the house. I'll finish it out in the fall of 2013.