Movie Theater
Planning
When we were looking for houses, i drove Kim crazy by ruling out houses that wouldn’t be able to accommodate a movie theater in the basement. Luckily, we found a house with a room in the basement the perfect size and with 10’ ceilings, making it the perfect candidate.
First order of business was to measure for just what type of seating i could squeeze into the room. The back of the room is slightly narrower than the front so I wanted to order one of the rows of 4 seats ahead of time to drop it in place and make sure a 2nd row would work well. Luckily it was a perfect fit.
I wanted to make sure before we began construction on the risers for the second row, that i was 100% confident that the layout I planned was optimal for all of the seats in the theater. The only way I’d be confident is by doing a full movie run through and checking the view from all different seats.
So, i grabbed a gallon of dark grey paint (BEHR Dark Secret - Matte Finish) and started painting the walls. This is a really backwards/out of order approach, but I really really wanted to test the full effect before construction started
Testing the layout
Watched an entire feature length movie (007 No Time to Die). Realized the original height for the screen I was planning on was too high, so I’ll need to lower the screen and boost the second row of seats higher than I originally anticipated. Distance from the screen was fine, so I locked in the measurements.
The most egregious part of the viewing experience was that window sticking through the middle of the screen. So some quick sheet rock and spackle work took care of that for good
Lighting
We wanted to really give off a modern theater vibe. So I found these sconces at Home Depot too replace the fluorescent droop ceiling lights. These provided a much less invasive and warmer lighting within the room. We hooked all 6 sconces up to a dimmer switch that would allow us to do very very gradual fade to black at show time.
The picture below shows the final product, you can see even when the lights are on, they don’t wash out the screen anywhere near as much as the fluorescent lights in the ceiling did.
Sound System
I decided to go with a Dolby Atmos 7.2.4 system. That includes:
3 Front Speakers
2 Surround Speakers
2 Rear Surround Speakers
2 Subwoofers
4 Ceiling Speakers
For the front and surround speakers, I got 7 Klipsch R-5650-W II speakers. I went with these because I’ve had a few Klipsch systems over the years and they have always sounded great. I also wanted something I could mount in the walls for a really clean look.
I used 14 gauge speaker wire running through the walls to hook everything up. It’s possible that 14 gauge is overkill, but I’m not looking to have to ever rewire this system again, so might as well try to make sure the wire isn’t obsolete within a few years.
Powering the entire system I have a Denon 6700 AR Receiver (bottom of the rack). This was significantly more pricey than I was hoping to go for a receiver, but in order to support the required channels of sound to support Dolby Atmos, the choices were all fairly high priced.
The Denon already comes capable of handling 8K video, so at least it is somewhat future proof (at least for a little while)
The two Dell racks at the top power my media server which holds roughly 42 terabytes of HD content.
Finishing the Walls
Now that most of the audio wires and electrical wires have been run through the walls, we can invest some time in finishing them up. We decided to cut all of the sheet rock off the bottom of the walls where the bead board was. We were hoping to salvage them, but the glue from the bead board just caused to much damage.
After a day or two of sheet rock, we were starting to feel like it was all coming together. After another 3 days of spackling, and a coat of pain I was starting to see light at the end of the tunnel.
Back Wall
In order to fully box in the theater, we needed to construct a wall in the back. So we cut away the drop ceiling and took it all down where we needed to put the wall. We decided to leave enough room for a 60” double door.
Building out the wall and sheet rocking the inside also let us install the back two surround speakers.
Projector
Up until this point we had been using an Epson projector I had already had, and while it was a fine projector, it wasn’t quite providing the same level of quality we were getting out of the new sound system, so it was time to upgrade.
I wanted to get a native 4K projector that was optimized for a home cinema. That would mean it was designed to operate in a light controlled environment, this would produce the best blacks on the screen.
I landed on a Sony VPL-VW325ES 4K SXRD Home Cinema Projector. It has native 4K, 3D and is IMAX optimized.
I didn’t love the look of the previous mounting kit we were using, so we decided to build an actual housing for it that would conceal most of it and blend in better with the ceiling. We used pieces of black shelving from Home depot to construct the housing. Since this projector had a lot more room for adjusting screen size, we were able to move it all the way to the back of the theater directly above the door frame.
The first viewing experience with the new projector did not disappoint. The picture and color quality is unreal. I can’t recommend this projector enough.
Ceiling
We had quite a few options when deciding what to do with the ceiling. We considered replacing it with sheet rock to pick up more height like we did in the gym, but unfortunately a large portion of the heating ducts are running above the theater, so all of that pain would only give us an extra inch or two of space and would also cut our ability to run more wires through the ceiling if I need to make any additions in the future.
So the final decision was to replace the drop ceiling tiles, but try to upgrade the aesthetic to match with the rest of the theater.
The existing tiles were 48 x 24. And I found the set of Armstrong tiles that had the look I was going for, but they were 24 x 24. So I had to pick up a set of cross braces for the ceiling grid so i could convert the openings to the right size.
The tiles were available in both with white and black, but I knew I would be painting them anyway so I could get an exact color match with the walls. So I bought the white tiles since they were in stock, and got to work painting the tiles, the ceiling grid and installing them one by one. I am super super happy with how it came out.
After 5 days of cutting tiles and painting tiles, we had a finished product. We were also able to finally install the 4 ceiling speakers making us officially Dolby Atmos enabled. The next step is building the second row platform, and installing the carpet.
Seating
For seating, I went with 2 rows of 4 Tuscany Chairs by Valencia Home Theater Seating. When the second row finally arrived, we did MANY height configuration tests before starting construction on the platform. From all reading/research I conducting, the standard is a 70” setback from row to row, and a 7” step up in height. This didn’t quite work for as as we had decided to keep the screen a little bit lower than the standard height.
Our platforms consisted of 8x4s with two layers of 3/4” plywood on top
This gave us a slightly above normal step up onto the platform. In order to squeeze out a little more height from the platform, we also bumped up just the back half by another 2 sheets of 3/4” plywood. We landed on this strategy to avoid the step up from feeling unnaturally high, and no one will feel that their chair is an inch and a half higher than the ground they are standing on
Woodwork
Next, we turned our focus into finishing up the screen. This meant boxing the picture in so that we could paint around the screen in black to get the right contrast. We also wanted a design that work look great even when the projector wasn’t on.
We started with several different sized trim boards that would go around the speakers as well as the screen. This created a few different rectangular areas around the screen that we wanted to use to get a little more fancy with the woodwork.
After that, I added a few more vertical pieces of 1x2s to create equal size rectangles across the bottom of the screen. I also threw a quick coat of paint on to get a sense for how it will look
Next, I cut base cap molding to fit perfectly within each rectangle. I painted all the base cap “Overcast” a much lighter grey than the dark walls to provide a nice contrast. All of these got nailed into place with my finish nailer.
I absolutely love the way it turned it. It was the exact look I was going for.
Carpet
For flooring, I went with carpeting from Shaw Floors. The color of the carpet is called “Movie Night”, which seemed very fitting. It was a dark grey that also had specs of a lighter grey that picked up the color in the woodwork.
We carpeted over the front of the platform but left the painted pine boards visible on the side an in the back. This gave it a nice custom look and would also allow us a hard surface to allow us to mount the aisle lighting.
To provide some lighting to move around when the lights are off we, we knew we need to mount some sort of lighting around the aisle. After much research, I decided on 16 foot Kasa Smart Strips from TP-Link. They aren’t made for this type of use case as they are super bright, but by lowering the brightness in the Kasa app to 1%, it achieved the right look.
To mount the strips, I found these great channel mounting kits from Home Depot that looked perfect. Just a few screws into the platform and they were good to go.
Entryway
For the entrance into the theater, we bought a 72” Jeld Wen Raised Molding door. We wanted the doors to match the moulding on the inside and this is a very close look
I ordered 2 black 16” door handles on Amazon since the standard door knobs didn’t feel like the right fit.
For the inside of the doorway, we did custom moulding to make the door stand out. The sides were 3 1/2” casing. A piece of extended half round above that going across the. A 7 1/2” piece of casing spanning the top of the doorway above the extended half round. A piece of 3 1/2” casing extending out horizontally above the large casing. And finally, a curved corner trim piece running where the top two pieces of casing meet.
I painted the trim Overcast like all the other work but painted the doors Dark Secret to match the walls. It took MANY coats to get the doors to looks this consistent.
The final touch just inside the door were these signs below that detail out the technology used inside the theater. I got them from an Etsy store names CineSigns. They have lots of different options and their signs are great quality. Definitely highly recommend them to anyone building their own theater. Friends and Family always get a kick out of these their first time seeing them.
Turning our attention now to the outside of the Theater Entrance, we really wanted a grand entrance that made it obvious that there is something special behind these doors. After much planning, and an insane amount of pine board and base cap I landed on this design.
