Epic Home Theater Build

Step 1: Buy lumber. Screw stuff together. Throw couches on top of it.

Enjoy the initial fruits of your labor! Casio XJ-A240 projector sitting on top of a hand-me-down HD-DVD player, temporary positioning.

Design all furniture to stack! Added hooks for hammock underneath!

Old photo when we just got the projector. Wall is unpainted, no surrounding fabric.

Basic color testing of Casio XJ-A240 projector.

One thing is obvious: The chandelier needs to go.

Removed! Notice the amount of light reflecting off the wall. We later surrounded the screen with ~$25 of light absorbing fabric

The gang just hanging out, black screen up.

Custom mount built, still had to stain the wood on the side.

Wiring for chandelier now powers projector. The dimmer switch bypassed so nobody makes a $1000 mistake by "turning down the lights"

Drunk people keep falling off the top couch, so we needed stairs!

Sand them edges!

Bought padded fabric, then lined the outside with theater colored fabric.

Stairs!

Mounting steps

Tedious

Done!

Now build bracing to hold up stairs.

It's a monster!!!

By building the stairs reversed (Jefferson style), they are more narrow and steep.

Pushing things together again. To be painted later with the top level.

Applied black fabric to the middle, with super soft red fabric for comfort below the feet.

No theater is complete without RGB lights everywhere!

Put a RGB LED strip up top, later inlaid within the wood.

Notice the mini table in the top left corner. We had a left over 12" circle cut out from an old sub woofer box. We just screwed it to some wood and bolted it in. Instant table!

New 12" home theater sub. Most components are either hand built or hand-me-downs.

RGB fading LED's mounted on scrap wood to be mounted under stair case.

Wired in series, matched to a spare DC power supply we had lying around.

Done!

Nice, dim, slow fading lights. Switch mounted on side of steps.

 

Yeah!

The dark furniture and fabric everywhere necessitated more light!

Temporary ghetto upgraded RGB controller to handle 46 feet of warm white LED strips

One warm white strip done.

Lighting done (cell phone pic)

How it looks today, pictures courtesy of Matt Ward