Media Room walkthrough - Part 3

Step 4 - The Screen

We've done the lights, and the painting, so now we need to make the actual movie screen. I did mine similar to my friend Jared's original screen, which means I made it from wood and wrapped it in Black out cloth.

As you'll see from the pics below, it's a simple wood frame, with two vertical cross beams. I used 4 pieces of 8ft pieces of wood from Home Depot, each about $4. NOTE: It's very important to buy wood that isn't warped or bent.

Here's the frame laying on the black out cloth, which I'll get to in a minute.

Here's one of the vertical cross supports. Basically, I took two of the 8ft pieces and cut them in half. Two became the outer edges of the frame, and the other two became the vertical supports, held together below by a metal T joint and screws.

And here's the corner joint, using a metal L joint.

Now the boards themselves were about an inch and a half, which makes the dimensions of the screen approx 96" by 51" which is around 108" diagonal viewing area.

The next step is to get black out cloth. Black out cloth (BOC) is avaibable at most fabric stores, like Joann's or something. It's basically the thick stuff you can get as a liner for curtains. I discovered this because everyone I talked to at Joann's in Frisco, where I got my BOC, asked me if I was making curtains. It's totally opaque, so no light gets through it, and some types of BOC is stretchy and a little reflective, which means you can wrap it around a wooden frame to make a screen. Well, it turns out that I had a wooden frame, so hey, let's buy some BOC and make a screen!

BOC, like most fabric, comes in a standard width of 54". You can special order different widths, but that takes time, and sometimes it takes more money, so I just stuck with the standard stuff. You'll remember that my frame is 51" tall, which means the 54" width of BOC would give me 3" of leeway. That's actually plenty, even though it sounds small, since we'll be stretching it around the frame. So I bought 3 yards (9 feet) of BOC, which would give me 3" of leeway top to bottom, and a foot of leeway left to right, since the frame was 8 feet wide.

The pics above showed the frame laying on the BOC, which at the time looks like a white bedsheet. The BOC I ended up buying had one side that was a little shinier, and thus more reflective, than the other, so I had that side down. I also made sure to vacuum the floor where I was doing this, to keep dog hair, dust and other stuff off of the screen. I also layed it down on another 'actual' bed sheet, to help keep it clean.

To get the BOC onto the frame, I used staples. In the pics below you'll see the staple gun and staples that I borrowed from Jared, and that I used to actually staple the BOC on to the frame.

Now this part is a little tricky, and it's also something you'll want to do with a friend. I ended up doing it solo, which makes it about FIFTY times harder, but it's still doable, just not recommended. The trick is to line up the BOC on the frame, and put in a few 'guide' staples. What I did was put one staple on each edge, just to keep the BOC connected to the frame as I flipped it around. After that, I added a few more staples, stretching the BOC each time. The goal is to stretch the BOC about as tight as you possibly can around the frame so you can't see any wrinkles on the screen. It should be flat, tight and smooth.

The reason this is best done with extra people, is because you'll need them to pull the BOC tight as you staple it around the frame. Otherwise, you're pulling with one hand, stapling with another, and somehow using your body to keep everything else stable and in place. Like I said, you can do it, it's just a lot easier with help.

A trick I heard about from Jared was to go around the frame clock-wise (or counterclock-wise?) because that helps keep the BOC from bunching. If you try to do it top to bottom and then left to right, the sides that get done first will get bunched around the edges because you'll end up being able to pull tighter on the sides you do last. So if you just go around the edges, one side at a time, in a circle, you can minimize that issue.

Here's some pics of the screen after I got it stapled down. Here's an edge-on view showing the staples.

And another one.

Here it is leaning against the wall, in a 'bad boy' pose.

Here's the one and only 'bunch' in the fabric I had. Easily fixed by pulling at the bottom and putting in another staple or two.
And here's the screen after it's been hung. The frame by itself is pretty light, maybe a few pounds or so. The BOC probably triples that weight, so the screen is probably in the 10-15 pound range I'm guessing. It's too heavy for just a nail to hang on, so you'll have to get the screws that push in, then screw out and use that bent metal to clamp from the inside. I'm sure there's a technical term for them, I just don't know what that is at the moment. I also don't have pics, but I can provide specifics on what I used later if people need to know.

This is where my dad and I scratched the wall when trying to hang the screen. Touch up painting, here we come.

Here's a side view. Notice anything weird?

If you didn't, I'll go ahead and tell you what's wrong. Look at the bottom right corner. It's not easy to see in that pic, but it sticks out more than the others do. It's warped at that corner, and that's from the fabric pulling on the frame so tight that it curves the wood frame there. It only sticks out about 2 inches, and that's easily fixable by nailing it down. One of the staples on that corner isn't all the way in, so I can just stick a nail through there and that will fix the problem. But I just wanted to illustrate one of the problems of building your own screen.

Some additional notes: It's probably best to NOT hang the screen until after the projector is hung/mounted. I got lucky, and mine turned out to be in a good spot, but I'd recommend waiting until you have the projector to make sure you have it exactly where you want it.

Also, at some time in the future I'm going to get some black felt, mount it to cardboard, or some other hard backing, and use it to create a border around the edges of the screen. That serves to cover up the staples around the edges of the screen, and also blocks out the white spaces around the edges, letting you adjust the border in to exactly fit the image size. I don't have it up yet, but I'll post pics once I get that done, so you can better understand what I'm talking about (for those of you who AREN'T already videophiles).

So what's the new tally? Well, the wood was around $16, and the L and T brackets, plus screws, added I think another $10. I forget exactly how much the BOC was the first time I went to Joann's, but I went back to get more to cover some windows and it was around $5/yd at the time, so we'll use that price. So 3 yards = $15, plus $26 = $41 to make a 108" screen. So the current total is what... $176?

Next, we'll talk about speakers.

http://kriskramer-mediaroom.blogspot.com/2008/06/step-5-speakersreceiver-lights-are-hung.html

Media Room walkthrough - Part 2

Step 3 - Painting

Now, one of the first things they teach you in Media Room Crafting 101 is that your media room should be dark, REALLY dark. The goal is to keep light from reflecting off of any other surface in the room other than the screen, to avoid washing it out. A media room has a singular goal, and that's to focus people on the media. In this case, it will be on a big screen, which we want people to be able to see. So... we're painting the room dark. And the color, as mentioned earlier, was inspired by a rug that I already had.

So let's get started. First, the dining room had molding, on the floor, the ceiling and a middle section right on the screen wall. So we had to tape everything up with the blue painters tape you get at Home Depot. Following are a few fascinating pics of just that...

Here's the tape covering the molding that is right in the middle of the wall where the screen will be.


The crown molding.


The dimmer switch installed previously.


And the dog, who's wondering what I'm up to... and why he's not allowed within a 10ft radius of the room.

The paint is Valspar, from Lowe's. It's a flat paint, which means it's a low gloss, although technically it's not zero gloss. I learned recently that paints have a gloss value from 0 to 100, and that 'flat' isn't 0, it's actually something like 5 on the glossy scale. You can get paint with 0 gloss at Sherwin-Williams or something, but I wasn't too worried about it, so I just bought regular flat paint from Lowe's.

The exact color I can look up later if anyone really wants it, but it's basically a deep burgundy color. You can get a good look at it here, as well where some of it chipped off when removing the tape:

Here's a sideways pic of the mid wall in-progress during the painting. You can see that after only one coat of this stuff, it looks really streaky and splotchy. You almost HAVE to put two or three coats to get it to look right. And that's pretty much what we ended up doing.

Here's the top corner, where I needed a stool and a tiny paintbrush to really get in there and finish it off. By the way, my mom helped me do a lot of the painting, but she did it for free so I don't have to include it as an expenditure. :)

The dimmer switch, post-painting. Again, the paint chipped off when removing the tape, requiring a lot of touch up. The lesson with this stuff is don't leave the tape on too long.

Here's the plastic drop sheet and the step stool we used to reach the high parts.

And finally, after a few coats, and two gallons of paint, the room is done... or at least it looks good enough to call it done for now.

Here's the main wall, as seen from the foyer:

And again from in the middle of the room. Notice all the light that gets to that wall from the window to the right and the foyer area on the left.... but we'll deal with that later.

The other end of the room.

And a couple pics of the side, with everything back where it was and hung up.

And one more pic of the screen wall. You can see the track lights at the top, and the Rock Back drums at the bottom right.

And the dog... still wondering what's going on, and why he can't drink the paint.

So, what's the current tally? Well, two gallons of paint, at $30 each, plus approximately $25 in supplies (roller, drop sheets, bin, brush, tape, etc.), brings us to $85 for the painting, plus the $50 for the lights, so a total of $135 so far.

Not bad.

Up next? The screen.

http://kriskramer-mediaroom.blogspot.com/2008/05/media-room-walkthrough-part-3.html

Media Room walkthrough - Part 1

So here we go. I've been promising to create this thing for a few months now, and I've finally found the motivation to sit down and start typing up a walk through that describes how I converted the dining room in my new house into a budget-friendly media room. As you can see from the title, this is only part one, and that's because I have a LOT of stuff to talk about, and somewhere around 100 pics to post, so no one can complain that I left anything out.

A quick note: I'm not an expert, and everything in here I learned as I did it. If you want to find some good info on this topic, I'd recommend http://www.avscience.com/, specifically the forums there. A lot of smart people visit that site.

Now, to start with, let me describe the problem I was trying to solve with this little project. A friend of mine, Jared, has a pretty nice media room in his house, and once I bought my house I wanted to do something similar, only without the heavy cash expenditure. My thinking was that I didn't want to lay out thousands of dollars for something that I wasn't sure I would get a lot of use out of. I like movies, and I have an XBox 360 that I play occasionally, but I didn't do either enough to justify upwards of four to five thousand bucks for a really nice media room. So, I decided a fun project would be to put together a budget friendly media room, somewhere in the neighborhood of $1500, for two reasons:

1) I could see just how much use I get out of it, and how practical it is for me given how busy I tend to be, and,
2) it would just be fun to do.

I had a couple of things going for me at the start of this project that made things a bit easier. One, I already had a pretty decent 5.1 surround sound system. It wasn't top of line, or new, but it would work well enough for now. And secondly, I could rely on Jared's knowledge, since he had already done all the legwork in creating and maintaining his own media room.

Now just to warn you, I didn't keep really good records of the prices I paid on everything, but I can give an approximation of everything I bought, so hopefully that's good enough.

So, now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's dive in and see how this project turned out for me!

Step 1 - The Layout

Let's start with the media room BEFORE it became a media room. My house has a dining room in the front, just to the right of the front door. Now, I'm a single guy, so what in the world do I need a dining room for?

Exactly. So goodbye dining room, hello media room!

Now, it's not exactly the perfect dimensions, it's one of those long, narrow dining rooms. The dimensions are something like 20ft long and around 10 feet wide, and it has a bay window so that adds another foot and a half to the length. So like I said, long and narrow. Plus most of one side opens up to the foyer expect for a 3-4 foot section that's walled off in the middle with a little arched platform in it (if that doesn't make sense, check the pics below), which is something else I'd need to contend with.

So let's see what we have to work with...

Here's a shot of the dining room wall that will end up being where I put the movie screen.

This is the opposite end of the dining room. Note the bay window, and all the light that gets in through it.

This is the window on the outside wall, right next to where the screen will go. Gotta do something about this one.

This is that little side wall/arch I was talking about. This is taken from inside the dining room, and you can see the foyer, closet, stairs and laundry room.

Another shot of the mini wall/arch, taken from the foyer.

The loveseat that I was originally planning on using for seating in the media room.

The super comfortable papasan chair that will also be used for seating.

The guitar I'm hanging up in the media room. I don't really play, but I have a guitar, so it's going up on the wall.
The poster on the opposite wall from the guitar that lists a ton of notes to learn. As with the guitar, it's ended up being just a wall decoration. But it looks cool.

The guitar amp. Makes a lot of noise. The kids love it. And not surprisingly, so do the adults.

The old TV. I'm thinking about getting a Wii someday and hooking it up to this. Haven't really decided yet. For now it's just sitting the back corner of the media room until I come up with a good solution.

The chandelier. This has gotta go. I'll touch on this again in a moment.

Here's the hardwood floors in the house, including the dining room. Not sure how conducive they are to media room acoustics, but it looks nice, so I'm ok with it.

Here's the rug that will be on the floor of the media room. I got it for free, so I'm gonna put it to use. And the dark red/burgundy color will be similar to what I'll be painting the walls.

The work bench. If you look closely at this and other pictures, you might notice that it's an old file cabinet.

Step 2 - The lights

Okay, so now that we have the lay of the land, it's time to start getting things done. The first thing I decided to do was change the lights. Remember that chandelier from above? Well, it's coming down. In it's place will be the track lights you see below:

Those bad boys cost me about $30 at Home Depot, so not a bad deal at all. And they have that curvy polished steel look, so go me!

And yeah, that's my sock at the bottom of the pic.

First things first, we gotta take down the old lights... (btw, this is still in my garage, so if anyone wants it, let me know).

Here is the dimmer switch that will be replacing the regular light switch. This allows me to not only fade the lights up and down (like a movie theater), but to set it at increments in between. Can't remember the exact cost, but I think it was around $20.

Here's the unsuspecting light switch that we'll be replacing.

And here it is out of the wall.

Now, just a warning to anyone trying to do this at home. BE CAREFUL! You're dealing with live electrical wires, so you have to cut the power at the switch box. Hopefully yours is labeled better than mine was and you don't have to switch off and on everything in the house to figure out which one controls the power to your dining room.

Another note, the dimmer switch you see above is actually the second one I had to buy. My dad helped me install the first one and I think we shorted something out.

So now let's skip down a couple steps, and..... voila! Here's the track lighting installed and working!

The lights in this picture are set at half. I know they look bright, but they're really not. It's a soft light, and it's more than enough for a media room, which needs light like Canadians need air conditioning.

Now there's obviously a lot more that goes along with this, but I'm just covering the basics here. If you want to actually swap out lights switches and install new lights, you're gonna have to do a little more research because I'm certainly not gonna be able to walk you through all of that in one little blog post.

That's it for part 1. Estimated cost so far is about $50, but all we've done is the lights. Up next in part 2.... we paint.

http://kriskramer-mediaroom.blogspot.com/2008/05/media-room-walkthrough-part-2.html