Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Finally My HT Pics

Thanks Capn.

I have the Panasonic PT-AE1000U with a 106" Carada screen. Yes, the bar area works well for the overflow crowd. A can of Bud Light sitting of he bar gets camouflaged so you have to be careful not to knock it over when trying to find it again.

Wow, extremely nice place Gene ... you did great. I too really like the bar area, we've been trying to figure out what to with the area behind our couch and your bar area is darn near identical to what we've been thinking about.

Beautiful work! I can't believe you were able to do it all in 8-9 months. I love the wood panels along the walls, but they bring me to ask the question: how does the room sound? It looks like there's a lot of solid surfaces for the sound to bounce around. I'm currently in the planning stage for a basement HT and I've been overwhelmed a bit by all of the "room acoustics" information. Did you give any thought about that when you built your theater? It sure looks great.

Thanks korkster. I guess I concentrated mostly on what I wanted the room to look like before considering room acoustics. The room in not square or even a rectangle (is that better?). And there's a notch where the fireplace sits (don't know if that helps or hurts room acoustics). The carpet is pretty thick and 2 rows of seats probably help to absorb some of the bouncing sounds. The room sounds pretty good to me. Maybe I got lucky or maybe I just don't know what to listen for when it comes to bad acoustics. Either way it sounds good to me.

That it sounds good to you is most important. your room looks like a great place to spend time in.

Nice place. I have a natural attraction to the color blue and anything sparkley. Sparkely and Blue!!! I'd be hypnotized!


Hmm, my spell checker seems to insist that I use the word Sparkling instead of Sparkly. OK, it may not be a real word but it sounds more fun to me.

I really need some sleep........

I had pictures once. The some A hole broke in to the house and stole my stuff. Still have my hometheater, but no movies. Nice place!

Great HT! I am new to the board & we are framing in our HT now that will be very similar to yours.
Would you mind giving some detail on how you made the lighted columns, bar & star ceiling tiles? I am particularly interested in the bar as we will have a nice L shaped bar. Your solution , I would think, should cost less than granite & is way cooler!

Thanks Archer. Welcome to the board. Real good people here. I gave some of the bar top details in a previous post. If you need more information than that just ask. As far as the lighted columns go, they are made of MDF (primed and painted). I have a 6ft fluorescent lights mounted inside the columns. The lighted panels are basically rail and stile glass cabinet door construction (router table and door making bits a must for this). MDF cuts really easy with the router. You must leave one side of the lighted panels removable to allow for changing of the light bulbs. On my removable panels, I countersunk some of those rare earth magnets (very strong) on both the panel and the column to hold the removable panel in place. Be careful to get the magnets lined up properly and the magnet’s poles the proper way before gluing them into the panels. To keep the magnetic poles straight, I put all the magnets together and then marked each magnet on one of the sides. For the glass, I just used stained glass. It’s pretty expensive. The glass I used cost me about $600. Some stained glass you can see through too easily so in this case you must use some light diffusers (like those used in suspended ceilings under the lights) so you can’t see the lights inside the columns. I went to a local stained glass dealer to choose the glass because it’s really the only way to see what you are getting. Pictures of stained glass on the internet don’t show you what you really get. Tip!!! If you are going to use some kind of stained glass, choose the glass first and then try to match the paint to it later. I ended up painting the entire room over again when I found the glass I liked.

For the lighted stars, I used a product from StargateCinema.com (I think). It’s an array of fiber optic strands powered by an LED “light engine”. The one I used cost $299. You can Google “Ceiling stars” to see some various products used for this. I used a smoother ceiling tile than I used in the rest of the ceiling and just painted it a midnight blue (almost black). You need to drill small holes in the ceiling panel and then glue the fiber optic strands in the panel. Tip!!! Mount the “light engine” first and then string the appropriate strands to EACH of the ceiling panel areas that you will be lighting BEFORE starting to glue up the strands. I started gluing up the first and second panel and when I got to about the third panel I had a tangled mess of fiber optic strands. If I had strung them properly to begin with, it would have been easier. Live and learn I guess. To turn the stars on and off, I used a remote control appliance module (Insteon from Smarthome.com) that I plug into the same outlet as my projector.

Let me know if you need any more information. The only plans I had to go from I sketched on paper and I don't have them any more. No one else would be able to decipher my chicken scratches anyway, so I can't send you any plans.

Measure twice, cut once! I can't even begin to tell you how many pieces I had to build twice because of mistakes!

Have fun on your build!