Cinematic 2

Well I'm pleased to say that the grand home cinema room project is now finished! Carrying on from where we left off last time, I'll talk you through the pictures.

The next steps were to paint and wallpaper prior to laying the floor.



Then I set about laying the laminate flooring (something which I had never tried before, but which was thankfully pretty easy).



And once the floor was down, I hung the curtains.



Next job was to tidy everything up with new skirting board and architrave. I had it delivered pre-cut into approximately correct lengths, so I painted it prior to installation - note the improvised system to raise it up off the floor!



I chickened out of fitting the skirting myself - I know a rather good joiner who came and did it for me (took him about 2 hours - it would have taken me all day and it still wouldn't have looked as good).

Once the DIY was all finished, I went shopping!



And then came the fun part - getting everything up and running! All the components (with the exception of the TV) were the same as the ones in my old house, so I was familiar with the setup and it all came together very quickly.

Here's some photos of the finished result:



 



 



So there you go - finished! I'm really pleased with how it has turned out, and after the grand premiere (Avatar, in case you were wondering) I'm very impressed with the sound and picture too. Already I'm starting to think of future upgrades (better speakers? Wall mount the telly? Projector?) but for now, this is very nice indeed.

Cinematic

And so it begins... after testing out the concept for a couple of weeks last year, I've started the official conversion of the garage room into a "proper" home cinema.

The room was initially a garage, and the the previous owners converted it into an office, complete with desktops, masses of power sockets, nasty fluorescent lighting, carpet tiles glued to the concrete floor and a weedy electric heater. It wasn't a very "cosy" room to say the least.

The plan was/is as follows: New insulated floor, raised up off the concrete underneath; installation of a decent radiator, fed off the existing pipework in the adjacent utility room; strip lights removed and replaced with adjustable downlighters; speaker cables chased into the walls terminated at a binding plate; relocation of power sockets; laminate floor, painting, new skirting and architrave.

So here's a few photos.

Firstly, the subfloor, complete with nice warm Xtratherm insulation:

And the boarding over the top of it:

And the ceiling spotlights...

Speaker cables fed through wall cavity down to below skirting level:

And the binding plate on the main wall:

And finally the radiator!

At the moment, I'm enduring the tedium of painting everything, and then I'll be wallpapering the main end wall which will be behind the TV and AV equipment. Then it'll be on to laying the flooring before tidying it all up with skirting and architrave. Once all that's done I can reward myself with a brand new 40-inch TV! I'll post again when I'm a bit nearer to completion.