Have you ever fantasized about building a home theater?
It’s not as hard as you think. You don’t have to be a celebrity or millionaire to have this kind of space.
With careful planning and budgeting, you can have your own DIY home theater for watching movies or playing video games. Here are ten tips for creating the perfect home theater.
1. Pick the Best Room for a DIY Home Theater
The first step is selecting the best room for a home movie theater. The ideal size will measure 20 feet long by 15 feet wide, with high ceilings. A room smaller will work fine, but you’ll need to scale back on your plans a bit.
Your room dimensions will dictate screen size. Take the size of your screen and multiply it by two to calculate viewing distance. For example, with a 50-inch screen you would want to sit 100-inches or 8.3-feet away.
2. Selecting a Home Theater Sound System
When selecting speakers consider your room size, budget, how the space will be used when it’s not a theater and how much volume or vibration you can live with (and considering your neighbors too).
There are many speaker options for building a home theater: center channel speakers above or below your screen, floor standing speakers, surround speakers and a subwoofer. Mix and match based on what you want and what will fit in your room.
3. Enhancing Your Home Theater Sound
If you’re building a home theater from scratch, purchase specialized insulation or drywall (the kind that actual theaters use).
For rooms being remodeled, select an appropriate acoustic treatment. This will prevent sound waves from bouncing all over each other and muddying your system’s quality.
Consider affordable treatments like a bass trap or diffuser, the type of foam paneling you see in auditoriums or recording studios.
4. Organize Your Home Theater Wiring
The wiring in your DIY home theater can turn into a nightmare if you don’t organize it from the very beginning.
Your projector, screen, speakers and lighting all need electricity, and each of your devices needs to be interconnected with cables; and to top it all off you want the wiring to be hidden from sight.
Keep your cables organized and use interconnects with ends that you can grip securely. Often you will be moving them through ceilings, walls or dark spaces. Plan to use thicker gauge wire for longer runs.
5. Home Theater Seating Options
There’s really no requirement for seating except that it needs to fit your space. Most people make their living room into a home theater so they already have the furniture.
If you remodeled a spare room or built a theater from scratch, you can fill it with new or used chairs, sofas or loveseats. Or you could have fun with the kids by sitting on bean bags or floor pads.
Serious connoisseurs invest in theater-style seating. For example, genuine leather chairs with cup holders or upholstered stadium-style seating. Choose what works best for you!
6. The Best Color for Your Home Theater Walls
The best color to paint your theater walls is black. Avoid any glossy finishes. This helps eliminate extra light or glare in the room.
Black may be too intense for some. In that case, another dark color should be fine. Remember, the point of having it dark is to keep your focus on the screen.
Many DIYers transformed their living room into a theater, with walls painted blue or green. They’ll still be able to enjoy the experience, just not at the same quality.
7. Light Fixtures for Your Home Theater
For the full cinematic experience, you’ll want recessed lighting with dimmers. Wall sconces are a nice finishing touch as well. Depending on your budget and vision, you can add ambient lighting or LED lighting strips to lead guests to the exit.
If your space has windows (like in a living room), position your screen where it won’t get glare from the sun or invest in blackout curtains.
8. Building a Luxury Home Theater
Have you considered a luxury home theater design? You don’t need to be filthy rich to make the space pop. Theater technology is developing so fast it’s more accessible for everyone.
The secret is building a realistic budget at the start, categorizing where the bulk of your spending should be. And from that point, balance quality and affordability for each category.
You don’t want to spend all of your money on the screen but have to sit in metal folding chairs. Stick to your budget and be realistic.
9. What’s Better for a Home Theater: Streaming or DVDs?
Streaming services like Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime are instant, convenient and have broad selections.
These services are starting to offer certain titles in ultra-high definition, but they are compressed files. In the long-term this can degrade quality. Streaming is also dependent on Internet speeds and we all know how unreliable that can be sometimes.
Blu-rays deliver 1080p resolution but they aren’t as convenient as streaming services. You’ll have to wait for titles to be released and buy or rent each one separately. This can be expensive over the course of a year.
10. Accessorize Your Home Theater to Look Like a Real Cinema
The last step is to enjoy your new theater. Accessorize with framed vintage movie posters, antique projectors or theater signs. Other options for transforming your space into a real cinema include installing movie theater carpets or custom light fixtures.
There are so many ways to customize your space. Maybe just invest in a popcorn machine so you always have it on hand for a screening? O
Need Help? Call Professional Help With Your Home Theater
Consider these ten tips when creating your perfect DIY Home Theater. But, the most important thing to do is consult a professional if you are unsure of where to begin. Home theater building requires a knowledge of carpentry, drywall, electrical work and AV technology. Sometimes its best to let the pros take it over.