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Attic home theater construction

68K views 23 replies 10 participants last post by  ishan 
#1 ·
Hello all,
Planning started a few years ago to turn our stick-built attic into a home theater. This will be for our own personal use and a showcase for some of our CinemaBuilder products.
In addition to the theater, there will also be a bathroom, library, and a huge walk-in closet. The peak roof height in approx 10 feet. The closet could have been another room, but the ceiling height in that area is only 6 feet.
 
#2 ·
Attic Plans - first part

Below are some of the engineering drawings (and mark-ups) that occurred during our Planning Phase for our attic home theater.

The attic will consist of a two-level home theater, a bathroom, a library room and a large walk-in closet. The home theater screen is located on the wall that is at the bottom of the Part 1 image.
Part 1
 
#4 ·
Pre-construction pictures of the attic theater

Below are a variety of pictures of the attic before construction began.

The first and second levels of the home theater side of the attic.


Part of the second level of the home theater and the home theater closet (which will be made on each side of the cathedral peak). The peak is due to a cathedral ceiling in the bathroom below).

The HVAC location which will have wall placed in front of - which will become the wall where the home theater screen will be placed. On the other side of the HVAC unit is the "Library".

The existing attic stairs - in an "L" configuration will be redone into a "U" configuration due to headroom issues as you get to the top of the stairs.
 
#5 ·
#6 ·
Home theater construction movies

I know it's hard to get an idea of the space from a few pictures, so I've posted a couple of home theater construction movies.
Select the following link: home theater construction movies and scroll down to the footer of the page and select "About Us". Then scroll down and select the "Cinema Builder Home Theater" pages.
Here's a direct link: http://www.cinemabuilder.com/our-home-theater/home-theater.shtm (but this link might break in the future as the site always seem to be changing)
Currently I have two movies on the site, one on the Framing Phase page and one on the Framing subfloor phase. Keep in mind these are over 20MB each, so they will take some time to download.
 
#9 ·
electrical

Some pictures of the low-voltage wiring that was run under the floor throughout the attic. Wiring included multiple: Coax, CAT6, HDMI, & Component cables. These will be run up into a structured wiring panel on the home theater closet wall. We used (and we recommend you use) flexible wiring conduit when running your cables (to make upgrading in the future easier). We also ran some of our cables outside of the conduit, so we can leave the conduit open for future cables.


Conduit running under floor - cables will come up from recessed floor outlets
 
#13 ·
What equipment are you using on the theater? Screen? Plz say you're doing a projector! I've never been as satisfied with a home theater project as I was/am with my 6' diagonal projector, adn that is a ghetto cheap unit. I don't know why people even buy tv's anymore.
 
#19 ·
Jogr - here's a thought - if you don't have anything nice to say, perhaps you shouldn't!

The reason we haven't posted in awhile is because we've been busy working on completing the project - which has taken much longer than we had hoped and we don't have the finished pictures yet. Still a work in progress.
 
#22 ·
Rather than this thread become a thread about dealing with someone elses viewpoint of our intentions and making accusations about us. I will state it again - we haven't posted simply because we are busy on the construction - that's all. Sorry if our posting frequency isn't up to some people standards - but we do have other priorities!!!!

So I think we'll just let this thread die and I have no desire to go into a battle over this with certain people on this forum who seem intent on just making their own conclusions.

Sorry for those of you who wanted to see the finished product - but if you truly are interested, you can check out our attic construction site http://www.cinemabuilder.com/our-home-theater/home-theater.shtm in which we just put some updated pictures. We hope to post the finished pictures there in about a month or so.
 
#24 ·
i have a lot of questions... =]

so my attic looks very similar to yours, maybe it might be a little bigger but i have the same plans for it. i'm planing on finishing it in the spring and put in a home theater system. right now the attic is over flowing with insulation. how did you lay the plywood down? did you put perpendicular floor joists over the current and then lay the plywood on that? either way pressing the insulation down, will that do any damage to the ceiling drywall on the second floor?
i'm going to be keeping up with your picture updates, so keep them coming!!
 
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