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