Our Family Home Theater

by Corey
(Iowa)

The Lubahn Family Home Theater

After seeing several dedicated home theater rooms during a tour of newly constructed homes, I decided to build one for my family in an unfinished section of our basement (with no windows).

I built this home theater by myself, with some help from my family, over the course of about a year. Our family home theater is not real big, basically 11 x 15, with a single couch that seats 4 (3 comfortably) but I am extremely happy with it and watching movies and TV in 100" high definition is simply awesome!!

The audio system consists of a Yamaha HTR-5960 receiver connected to 7 Home Theater Direct (HTD) in-wall speakers and a Klipsch 10" subwoofer for 7.1 surround sound. The video setup consists of a Mitsubishi HC4900 1080P 3LCD projector matched up with a 100" Elite EzFrame screen with High Contrast Grey fabric. I use a Sony BDP-S300 Blu-ray player for movies and a Dish Network VIP722 HD DVR provides the television feed. I also have an XBox and a Gamecube hooked up to the system.

The electronics all reside in a built-in rack that I recessed into the wall that separates the theater from the utility room in the basement. The back of the rack is hinged so that I can access all of the wiring from the utility room (no more pulling everything out to change wiring!!). On the other side of the room is an identical built-in unit, configured for DVD storage. Beyond that there is also a 5 x 5 attached walk-in closet which we use to store DVD overflow and all of our board games and video games/controllers.

The lighting in the room is all controlled using Smarthome's Insteon line of switches which, along with their RemoteLinc remote control, gives me complete control (from the couch) of all three types of lighting in the room, the 4 recessed lights in the ceiling, the 4 wall sconces and the rope lighting in the crown moulding. The remote is also set to control the lights in the rec room to which the theater is connected by french doors.

My favorite part of the lighting setup is that I configured the remote with a 'Movie Start' button that automatically dims all of the lights to the proper level for movie watching with a single button press. I also configured a 'Movie End' button that brings them back up to a proper level for moving around the room once the movie is over.

All in all this project was a tremendous success and a whole lot of fun. There were times when my wife got sick of hearing about my latest idea for the room or the many decisions that I fretted over along the way, but now we (me, the wife and our 2 1/2 year old daughter) absolutely love watching movies down in our own personal movie theater.

The Mitsubishi looks absolutely fantastic, the audio system rocks and I couldn't be happier. If you're looking for anyone in my family, chances are we'll be in the basement in our family home theater room; we spend a lot of time down there.

Article date: March 28, 2008