Small(ish?) Theater Build

Greetings all,

We're taking ownership of our new construction in Ashburn, VA in a little less than two weeks. I'm very much looking forward to building a home theater in it. It has a dedicated "media room" in the finished basement that is 19'5" x 11'11" with ~ 8' 5" ceilings. So, its not terribly large in comparison to some of the monster dedicated theaters I see in this forum.



I'm trying to get some inspiration as to what I can accomplish in this space. In retrospect, I probably should have not had the builder finish the space, and then frame it myself, but its already drywalled and wired. I had them prewire in 7.1 with a projector electrical outlet in ceiling. I ended up coming in one night pre-drywall and pulled HDMI/Cat6 in the ceiling (because the LV contractor they force you to go through was absolutely ridiculous about the prices they were trying to charge for pulling HDMI in wall pre-drywall). It is hiding in the ceiling near the electrical outlet.

I plan on the screen being on the right side of the above floorplan and seating on the left. The space on the far right of the floorplan (behind where the screen is going to go) is unfinished storage with HVAC. This is where my rack is going to go for the whole house (networking, servers, A/V gear, HA gear, etc).

What I'm wondering is, has anyone on this forum done a theater in a room this size (links)? I won't be able to put up any sort of major soundproofing since the walls are already up (or am I incorrect in this?) I'd love to do two rows of 3 seats, with a riser in the back of the room. Even a small stage might be nice, but I'm afraid the doors are somewhat in the way for this.

I've already started a dialogue with BIG (since he lives about 15 minutes from me) and plan on utilizing his expertise for this project as well. He's definitely done some amazing builds.

Anyway, looking forward to some comments here and maybe browsing some other similar-sized build threads (I could only find ones that were quite a bit larger than mine. Hmm, that didn't sound right.)

This looks amazing! It definitely gives me confidence that I can build a good looking theater in my small space. It will just take the vision of someone who has done it before (cough cough BIG).

It sounds like he's going to come by in a few weeks after I take delivery of the house to give a consultation and look at the space.

Thanks again for all the links.. if you have any other thoughts please feel free to post them up here!

I'll likely use this space for the build as well once the ideas get flowing!

So, we took ownership last month and I have just now settled down enough to start thinking about the HT.

Jeff swung by today to take a look at the space and give some analysis (pretty nice that he lives 20 minutes away from here) and I think I have a game plan.

Since the room is already finished, I'm not quite sure I want to tear it all down and completely soundproof the room. I have some home work to do (need to hook up an AVR in there and a sub and blast it and see just how bad the sound transfer is upstairs and outside. If its too much, then I need to consider gutting and rebuilding the room with proper soundproofing techniques (adding several thousand dollars of expense and time to the project) Unfortunately with this way I will have to redo some HVAC too since there are two supplies and no returns in the space, as well as pull double doors out of the room and put a single sealed door in.

Hopefully, the sound transfer upstairs won't be too terrible (normal viewing in the theater hopefully will not cause too much annoyance upstairs, but we'll see). This way I won't have to worry about completely soundproofing the room and doing all the work above. If that's the case then I can get cracking right now.

The plan is to put some soffits around the room to put some lighting in, as well as use rope lighting around the edge of the soffit to light the ceiling (some moulding will cover up the rope lighting).

Since the other side of the wall that will have the screen on it is my unfinished storage area, I'm going to rip down the drywall on that wall, leave it framed up, and then frame a new wall about 2 feet further back into the unfinished storage area that will become the "real wall". The framing for the old wall will just be used to hang the screen and then hang panels on it to create a false wall. This way I can build my speakers into that small area behind the screen and I'm not limited to using in-wall speakers/subs.

I need to sketchup the space and some of my ideas and post them up, but Jeff's visit was very helpful to consider some other ideas I hadn't thought about before.

Definitely looking forward to stealing some of his time in the next month or so to start on this project!

I'll post photos of where I'm at now and during the entire project as well.

I should change the title to "The 'Why Am I Destroying A Perfectly Good Room' Build"...

...I've decided to go all-in with this. I set up a (admittedly crappy) subwoofer and a couple of tower speakers and turned it to where I think I would be watching movies at, and it was ridiculously loud even two floors up.

In retrospect, I should have left this part of the house unfinished and done it myself -- but I was not even thinking about sound proofing at that point. I was just going to hang a projector and a screen and call it a day... until I found this sub forum here. (argh!)

So, I'm going to soundproof the room (clips + channel + dd/gg). I plan on starting demo this evening after work. I'll attach photos of my progress.

I've lined out the general plan above but right now its going to consist of:

- pull up carpet/liner
- pull off/salvage as much trim as I can (might be able to reuse some of it)
- remove doors and cover up so as not to spread drywall dust everywhere
- pull down drywall (all four walls and ceiling)

At that point, I can see what I'm dealing with. I know I have 2 HVAC supplies in the room (one in the front, one near the middle/rear), so I'm going to have to figure out how to get a return into the room (likely a soffit since I plan on building them around the room anyway for lighting). I know the builder used rigid ducting for supplies, so I'll probably try to get rid of that and move the supplies to the front of the room and get a return near the rear. Does this sound right? Would 1 return be enough for 2 supplies? Or do you think this is something I should hire a HVAC guy to come do?

Anyway, here are some before pics of the sound leaking room.





Any comments before I begin? :-)

Yep. I plan on framing in a solid core door and sealing it.

I also plan on replacing the hollow core door to the sump room with a solid core and sealing that as well.

Since the riser/seating will be by that back sump door, I'm going to lift it to riser height and have it open into the sump room, so it doesn't interfere with seating. I believe it will just barely fit that way.

The general plan is to create soffits to carry 8" flex to the back of the room for a return. The joists run left to right in these photos (north to south in the floor plan). Hopefully I can figure out a way to get both the return and cans in there for accent lighting without eating up too much space.

I'm going to try to salvage as much as possible.

I still have yet to start demo. I keep trying to talk myself out of soundproofing and just build the theater in this space since so much is already done...