For seating, I have two rows of seats (four in front and two in back). The seats have electric reclining motors. My wife hates the fact that they are leather and almost always puts a blanket under her.
This is one of the reasons why I like microfiber... I've never really understood the appeal of leather furniture. Different tastes, I guess!
I don't have any current shots of mine but I have a few old construction shots, pulled from one of my old galleries, hence the poor quality and small size. These might be interesting for those thinking about building their own.
Quick background - when we bought a house back in 2002, setting up a theater in the basement was one of my top priorities. We needed something with a dry basement and eventually ended up with a new house. My father is a pretty good amateur handyman (much more so than I! it's usually a tragi-comedy of errors when I build something myself), and between the two of us, we worked out a design and have done 100% of the work ourselves.
Fortunately the basement was an almost perfect layout... I had about a 12'x24' area to work in. It's a 12-course basement which means that even on the riser for the second row of seats, I can stand up (I'm 6'2") and not hit my head on the drop ceiling.
Here's a basic shot early on in the framing, taken from the stairs which are against the back wall. The "other half" of the basement is on the other side of the studs on the left; I've had various plans for that area but it's mainly a place to pile my tools and various PCs. You can see a big window on the left wall; the original plan was that I'd have the room on the other side as a place to work on PCs and I'd be able to watch a movie on the big screen through the window, and close a black curtain over it the rest of the time. You can also barely see that the plumbing comes in in the right rear, we ended up building a big box to hide all that.
One thing we did was build a proscenium, which basically means that the screen is enclosed on all sides like on a live theater stage. We built a stage on the floor and it's filled with many hundreds of pounds of play sand, to make sure that the subwoofer (one for now, hopefully two later) doesn't waste any energy vibrating the wood instead of making noise.
What's a theater without an actual film projector?
I have a 16mm (seen here) and an 8mm, and a small selection of movies. The 16mm stuff is really very high quality in terms of sharpness, better than DVD certainly.
Here's a shot fairly later in the build. The drop ceiling is up (special-order black ceiling tiles), the projector is hung (Sharp Z2 which is a 720p one, I hope to put in a 1080p projector one of these days), the frame for the screen is in place (it sits on hangers so comes off easily), the soffits are painted, the can lights are in, the box is built around the water pipes (there's a dehumidifier hidden in there too), and the towers for the speakers are built. The speaker towers will eventually be covered completely in speaker fabric so you won't see the actual speaker inside. The walls are unpainted because I plan to put some sort of red acoustic fabric or carpeting or
something on them. I eventually did a quick red paint job on them just to make it look a little better until I do that!
One thing I did was build in a
lot of space for DVDs and related things! I did the math one day and I don't remember the exact number, but there's room for over 1,300 DVDs. I'm pretty much getting just Blurays now, which are thinner so I could fit even more!
I also have a pile of old 35mm film reels from the George Eastman House theater, there's one on the wall there, I plan to make tables out of a few, etc. You can also see one of the smallish rear speakers; someday they'll be replaced with something bigger and better. There is also trim around the shelves now, painted gray to match the shelves themselves. Also - I am a total sucker for big fancy special editions. I have honestly never even watched the movie on the far left of the top shelf, but I found a great deal on it and couldn't resist the packaging.
You can see one of the old real theater seats that I have on the riser in the back row. These came out of a theater (live shows, not movies) that was being torn down, I found 'em on eBay, they even still have little gold badges on the back with names of people who donated money to the theater. There are four in the back row. We also cut up the concrete floor and ran conduit to under the riser, so there's power on both front and rear as well as a couple Cat5 cables, just in case I ever need them. The front row is currently an old couch; eventually I plan on three reclining red microfiber
In the rear, there is an air hockey table behind the back row of seats, plus my fully working Baby Pac-Man game and a couple half-torn-up arcade cabinets that are to become MAME machines. (A PC-based arcade game emulator.) One with a vertical screen, one with a horizontal - the horizontal will also have emulators for many old game systems. Both have new 19" arcade monitors in them. One is about 95% functional, the other about 50% - they've been that way for a few years now. It's funny how having a kid in the house makes it very difficult to find time to work on such things!
I have various large movie posters on the walls, too - you can see the corner of an Army of Darkness one on the left. Currently up are also a Star Wars, an Empire Strikes Back, a Labyrinth (for the wife!), and an Incident at Loch Ness.
One of my best friends in the construction process... gotta love a
serious hammer!
. I need serious help in organizing my cables. It's quite ugly.
Really sad day.
). The TV is a 65" Mitsubishi CRT rear projection and the speakers are the B&W DS6 line
I got it 100% functional then work slowed down dramatically. (The main work was done over probably 3 months or so, working most nights and weekends.) Things like painting the walls, installing carpet tile, putting up some trim, etc took me a long time. Still on the list are wall treatments, building a proper rack for the equipment, finishing the trim, getting microfiber recliners, and a few other smallish things. Mostly stuff that costs money! But when the lights are out, it doesn't matter!
