So I think that we are now looking at flipping the room... Screen on the right, seats on the left. There is going to be a wet bar to the lower left of the home theater, and I was thinking that while not ideal, I could still bump out an equipment and movie storage in that area, still making staggered walls, and still DD+GG for them. I will be sealing the first layer of drywall with acoustical caulk sealant too. That will keep the equipment in the room, but not up front where I need to worry about LED lights disrupting or distracting from the movies. I will still need to put in some sort of IR repeater (maybe that HDMI one that Randy mentioned earlier). Flipping the room and putting things back in that area would allow for me to build an equipment rack that would accommodate future upgrades or added gear as need be. I am not completely sure on how to make the media and equipment storage look like part of the room. The equipment shouldn't be too bad since things are pretty much all black, but with movies, you have all of the spines on the cases in all sorts of different colors.
I was thinking about using curtains on the front wall to also mask the 2.35:1 screen, and then maybe put 3 columns on each side of the room, and in between the columns, put more of the curtain material pulled tight, but with more width in the curtain that the space I need so that it will be all "pleated" but cleaner than just "hanging" there. Then I could put curtains over the storage/equipment area as long as I had some air flow for the equipment.
Maybe not though since it could either come out neat like a regular movie theater, or end up looking sloppy. Either way, I think that I have a game plan. I thought that I would have been framing it up earlier today, but I wanted to put more thought into things, and decided to finish up framing around duct work and the main drain pipe that comes from upstairs. My wife also wanted a small cubby hole as a decorative element in the family room, so I had to tear out some studs and rework it. Now, I just have a single 9 foot duct that runs right along side of the main support beam that will take about 30 minutes to frame up and then I can start the staggered walls.
I knowingly underestimated on my stud order and will probably run out about 2/3 of the way through the 2 home theater walls, but that is OK. I will only have one more wall and one 10 foot long duct to construct for the game room area and between there and the storage room. My goal is to be 100% framed up by the 20th. That will be 30 days since I got my permit. Then get all of the electrical done in 3 more weeks (I will be out of town for work for 1 week). Somewhere in there I do need to add a window for the bedroom, but it needs to be ordered so it may actually end up coming about the time I am half way through the electrical.
I also need to decide if we are going to remove a 10'8" beam that runs in line with one of the stairwell walls and put in a 14' replacement (had an engineer do all of the numbers for us). The beam rung about $170, but I am a little nervous about having to jack up the trusses about 1/8" in order to pull out the old beam where it rests on the concrete exterior wall, and then manhandle the new one in place just to open things up a couple of feet at the bottom of the stairs. Lots to think about.
