TheaterBlog: The Theater has Power

The theater has been progressing well, especially over the past couple of weeks. First off we had to put up all of the treatments on the walls:

We used two types of materials: OC703 (2" thick, covered with FSK along the rear wall) and Bonded Acoustical Cotton (2" thick). Bryan Pape, the audio guru, listed their roles as follows:

OC703 is for Front corner triangles, front wall, and rear wall. FSK is to be bonded to the rear wall material - FSK toward the room
but foil side toward the fiberglass.

Triangles in front corners are 17x17x24" stacked floor to ceiling. Balance of front wall is 2" bonded to the wall. BAC is bonded acoustical cotton and is for the side walls. 5' high from bass absorbers to the 2nd column on the side wall, 4' high from there back.

Getting them on the walls was pretty easy, just used liquid nails to adhere them and then a screw with a fender washer for added security. Having pulled at least one of them down since then, liquid nails alone should honestly suffice.

With the treatments up, I needed to get a few other things done. The soffit/light tray needed to be finished. While it was already sheetrocked it needed to be mudded, sanded then painted.

A friend of mine has been decorating my house for the past few months now and she picked Behr's Stone Hearth color as a match for what was in the renders. She's got an amazing eye for design and the color came out great:

The theater also finally has power. Some of the lighting fixtures have already been installed, although I'm waiting on getting the cloth panels up on the walls before putting the sconces on the walls.

Lighting in the room is controlled by a Lutron GRAFIK Eye 3000. The GRAFIK Eye is a multi-zone programmable dimmer, which lets you dim lights individually as well as create presets for the levels of all of the lights. With an optional $700 serial interface (that's right, $700 for a serial port) you can connect the GRAFIK Eye to a computer. The goal here is to connect the GRAFIK Eye to the HTPC and have the lights dim to the right levels once you start watching a movie.

The theater also now has doors. The doors are are non-hollow Masonite Safe and Sound doors from Home Depot, nothing too special about them other than the fact that they are supposed to be better at not transmitting sound. I'm not 100% sure on what I'm going to do to the doors (e.g. whether or not to attempt to cover them with GoM on the inside of the theater or just leave them looking like doors), but I've got time to figure that out.

There are only a couple of major construction items that need to be taken care of in the room and once we get it cleaned up, the actual carpeting can go in.