I’ve had a really fun day today (caution: this post contains an over abundance of geeky stuff).
Clem is staying with us at the flat for the weekend so I left the two girls alone and took myself off “window” shopping for components for my (still to be constructed) home cinema.
I’ll go over the project as it currently stands. The house we have bought has a single-storey extension that is currently divided into three rooms: the garage at the front (3.3m at the far end tapering to 2.2m at the garage doors and 4.4m long), a small downstairs toilet and the kitchen. We are increasing the size of the kitchen by moving the toilet into the garage. This, of course, means that I will lose about 90cm of the length of the garage. We will then be turning the garage into a home cinema/media room.
Here are a couple of pictures of the garage at present:
I had been planning on mounting a screen on the long wall at the rear of the garage and placing a couch where the current doors are (these will be replaced with a window during the conversion) but The space was just too tight. Instead, I’ve decided to mount a motorised projector screen on the ceiling in front of the window and place a sofa(bed) at the rear of the garage. As the room is not overly big, I’ve decided to keep as much of the equipment as possible out of the room and I think I have found the perfect place to put it – in the larder in the current breakfast room. Here’s a picture of the larder at present:
As you can see, there is a gas meter at the bottom of this. I’ve done some research and have discovered that electrical sockets can be placed as close as 150mm to this meter and that I can box this off (which I will do). I will need to cool the cupboard as all of my media gadgets get pretty hot…
When the electrician comes round (hopefully in the next week or so) to do the ‘first fix’, I will get him to fit ten power sockets, a phone port and a TV aerial point in this (now renamed) control room. I also want a plastic conduit to run from the base of the control room under the floor to emerge at the back in the centre of the garage. I can then feed the HDMI, speaker, subwoofer and network cables through it and if I need to change them in the future I can without too much disruption.
Here’s a (crappy) diagram of the home cinema layout and it’s relationship to the control room:
I spent a few hours visiting a few AV shops in Bristol looking for advice and also looking for a good deal on an AV receiver. I can’t afford to buy everything in one go so I figured I’d spread the burden. I settled for the new Onkyo 607 AV receiver which decodes pretty much every surround sound format you can think of as well as having 6 HDMI inputs. I got a great deal in Seven Oak’s sale (£399). Next up are the speakers (my sound bar just isn’t going to cut it). I’m leaning towards the KEF 2005.3 setup but I have another month to wait…
Although things are still a long way away, I’m really excited about the project.