Home Theater: Hmm... Maybe Red?

I must have really intense A.D.D. (attention deficit disorder) genes in my blood.  (Hi Ma!)  I took one of those A.D.D. tests on-line, and my score was off the chart. I made myself feel better by subsequently taking an on-line IQ test for ha ha's, and was happy to yield a score of 131.  I don't know what that means, and I doubt the test is reliable, but I'll just be happy in my own little world believing I'm only 34 points south of  Einstein's estimated IQ. Lol!  Anyway, the point is, I was nearly done with the riser, I managed to stain the trim, hook up the outlet receptacles, and install the 3 step lights (which look really cool), and I was THIS CLOSE to being done, and I had a revelation: Is the color right?  I realized that the 'old room' was a beautiful 'Restoration Geen' like green color, (I think the actual color is 'Lakeside Cabin' from Benjamin Moore, in Latex Flat finish), but now that I have two rooms, I can't possibly have this awesome theater be the same color as the study can I?.. Did I really want to repaint this big room? All I had to do was to paint one stupid wall, and I could get back to watching movies in grand style with the fam. Crap... Off came the speakers, the glass speaker shelf, the cable brackets,  off came sconce lighting, and out came the red swatches.

I'm actually a half-way decent painter, but I have to confess I botched this up pretty good. I finally got it right, but only after I re-painted the room no less than SIX times... The first mistake, was that I figured since lots of kids were going to be in here, that I should paint the room with an eggshell finish, thinking the walls would be easier to clean. The rest of the house is flat finish, which looks gorgeous, but if you bump the wall with your hand, it will leave a mark. It's only now I realize that flat is king in any room, because even though it marks easily, you can spot roll it perfect with a 2" roller, and never see the repair job. Try that with eggshell... it ain't gonna happen. Anyway, not knowing that at the time, I went ahead with a Poppy red in eggshell finish, and after 2 coats (including re-cutting the edges), I had the 1st version of the red room to look at... and then I realized I'm an A-hole for not realizing that the eggshell would be too shiny to use in a screening room, since the huge screen would essentially reflect enough light to generate massive specular highlights on every wall. What an idiot, I'm actually in the film business for 17 years, one would think I would have avoided that little oversight.. DOH!..  So, okay, I figured one coat of flat to bring it back to what it needs to be... well, nope.  I picked up the next 2 cans of flat at a different Benjamin Moore store, and the guy told me I'd have no problems re-coating the flat in 1 step. Not only was the wall still shiny, but the wall was definitely not flat. Flatt-er maybe, but not like I wanted it. (dead-flat).  Now I had re-cut, and painted the room 3 times now, and it still wasn't right. Not only that, but I was also realizing that this Poppy red I was looking at for a month, is actually too bright overall. *sigh*... Okay, I'm comitted to getting this really right, and well, maybe I'm adding a little bit of extra sound-proofing with the now 1/8" extra layer of latex on all the walls.  I found a darker, less saturated red, which is actually a 'Pottery Barn Red' color that they carry, and ordered 3 cans in Ultra Regal Flat, which is the flattest thing they make, next to ceiling paint. This finally worked, after 2 full coats (with re-cutting all edges!) and a 3rd and final (make that 6th and final) roll over all the walls.  I finally had the red I was looking for.

Time to put the speaker shelf and speakers back up:

And I decided to put some shelves up to make good use of the little cavity left over from the jog in the wall which was bi-sected when the new wall went in:

The shelves were all painted white when I went around to re-do all the base trim.


Here's a shot of the now-working step lighting:

And finally the new carpeting!

I bought all of the basement carpeting from iCarpetTiles. The new carpet is a brown soft tile from the same company, but they apparently got an over-stock from the premier carpet tile company Flor.   This was a bit more expensive, but still cheap by flooring standards at $1.29 per square foot.  Flor would price this at anywhere from $6-$12 per square foot.


Next post:  Tying it all together

Home Theater: The Riser...

This was probably the most exciting reason behind the decision to turn the room into a major construction project, 3 months after we moved in. What would a dedicated screening room proper be without stadium seating? Well, I had the design in place (previous post), but I knew I would also need to figure out a few key things like electrical outlets for the chairs, wiring and a switch for the step lights, insluation, and running a few accessory ports through the riser to add accessory wiring for things like ButtKickers.

Here you can see the framing, it's going to be a two stage riser, with a neat curve to match the radius of the back of the chairs. 

Next, here's the insulation going in, and accessory ports I put in using two 2" pvc pipes. You can see that I tapped an electrical outlet on the far wall to run power to the riser.  It was pretty simple, I drilled a hole in the bottom of the outlet box, and put a big hole through the framing at the bottom, which is covered by the insulation. I fished a wire through there, and pulled 14/2 wiring up through there for later hookup.

Below I have the wiring going up to power a switch for the step lights. I know it's not usually to 'code' to run lighting off a circut that is deadicated to electircal outlets, but this switch will power only 3 lights of 25 watts each. I checked with a few people who know a lot more than I do about this, and they said it shouldn't be a problem.

Here's a few more angles of the riser. I'm adding these because I benefited a lot from seeing other people's in-progress creations, which gave me a lot of confidence that I could do this, so I'm returning the favor to any future riser designers/builders ..

Here are a couple of shots with the sheething on, now that the rough electrical is in place. you can see that I have four six 4-gang outlets for the 11 chairs. The top two outlets are not visible, because those outlets are flat on the floor, up by the new wall. The two square ports in the middle of the bottom riser, are actually for access to the two long pvc pipes to fish wires through.

In this photo (below)  you can see the maple trim around the riser (sort of anyway):

 

 

The next post.  Hmmm.. maybe Red?

Home Theater.. A room evolves

So fast forward to October 2009, and we have finally closed on our home and moved in. It was bitter sweet, as we were still reeling from the insane process of closing on a construction project in probably the worst housing market on record. Between having banks fail (that were holding our new mortgage) to incurring thousands of dollars worth of additional unforseen expenses, we were finally glad to at least be able to look forward and start enjoying all the space that the new home would provide to our family.

So back to the project, we now have a bare room, and a screen which I installed from the previous home in Milford. In fact, I took ALL of the home theater gear from the first man cave project in Milford, which I posted earlier. This was certainly helpful to not have to re-spend those dollars. When we sold the first home, it was amazing how everyone wanted the home theater, but nobody wanted to pay anything extra for the gear... They assumed it was like tag sale furniture, that you'd be willing to part with for free.  I on the other hand thought that someone with a penchant for sports, movies, etc., would at least be willing to pay a little something extra for a fully decked out theater, but I should have known better, given the economic climate.  So, moving out simply required a little more work to box up the old gear.  The hard part was removing the old screen, as that was hidden behind some decorative poplar wood which required a major repair job after the surgery was done. Thankfully, the new room in the Trumbull home would accommodate the screen, as well as the speakers and other equipment.


So here are the first pictures of the room, which is pretty bare at this point:

I don't think I have any pictures of the speakers installed here at this point, but that was my next step. I installed the Amps, and gear in the rack, and hooked up the speakers to the wires which I had already placed in the walls.  The front speakers were held on a really nice wire cable shelf, with half-inch thick glass as a support.  We didn't have any seating yet, since we were really low on cash didn't want to spend money on anything for a while after the move.  But, the kids didn't really mind watching a few movies on pillows in this spacious 40 foot long room.

After about a month, I had my office setup in the back room, which was fantastic for doing homework by the fireplace, and I was really starting to dig having my office in a nice quiet part of the house. As we started to regroup, and think about how we might want to have others come over to watch movies, (as well as get ourselves off the pillows on the floor), we started to contemplate seating. I decided that I had a real opportunity here to one-up the last man cave by getting some real home theater seating. This would work out nicely, and I could purchase the seats one row at a time to save on costs.  As I do with a lot of things, I went through an intense research process to see what was the best value in home theater seating, and I ultimately settled on the Berkline 2006 models which I purchased from Ultimate Home Entertainment.  Roman was absolutely terrific in answering probably hundreds of questions that I had about various types of chairs, even those offered by other companies than those he carried.  There were cheaper chairs to be purchased on Ebay and other websites, but ultimately I realized I had become loyal to Roman who I know would support me on any future issues that might arise, and I would highly recommend him to anyone looking for their home theater seating needs. 

I forgot to mention that during my research, I became aware of an interesting 'option' that you can get with home theater chairs..  ButtKickers...  I knew what they were, as I've been an avid home theater and car audio enthusiast for many hears, but I had figured that the idea of having a transducer attached to your chair, was nothing more than a gimmick. However, upon further research, I realized this was something that I simply must have if I was going to get real seats.. The idea is that sound and visuals aren't enough to trully get the best experience in watching films...  You want to appeal to as many sensory inputs as possible to have the best experience. Imagine yourself watching the chase scene in "Gone in 60 Seconds", in a typical theater, you hear the gun-shots, but the sound coming from the speakers, no matter how powerful the sub-woofer(s), will really capture that like a transducer. With a ButtKicker, you don't just hear the gunshot, you feel like you were shot.  Moreover, It's apparently recommended that those with heart conditions avoid using these.  Okay, now I'm hooked. I may not be able to afford to put these in all the seats, but I was definitely going to put them in at least some...


So much for my lack of verbosity here...

Anyway, Through my many conversations with Roman, he presented me with a very serious dilemma.... He said the room wasn't going to really work with the open space I had initially planned. I didn't believe him at first, my last home had a sort of 'J' shape to it, and the sound was fine. But I did agree, that ultimately it was sort of awkward spatially having a cool home theater on one end of the room, and an office/study on the other end. He suggested I build a wall to separate the rooms. The way he said it, made it seem like it would be easy as pie, almost like there was no afterthought regarding the cost, time difficulty, etc. He also started talking crazy about adding stadium seating, which I thought would be really cool, but didn't think I needed at that time. I tried very hard to ignore his advice, but ultimately I knew he was right on several levels. Not the least of which was sound. I knew if I wanted to be watching the next 'Transformers' down there late at night, that I was going to need to do something about sound, less my wife Mary be very cross with me, pounding the floor with her foot hanging over the bed 2 flights up..  So I began to research what it would take to actually build a wall down there, bisecting the space in two. I kept wishing I wasn't having this problem, that I had only forseen this earlier when the builders were still there. I did speak to the builder about it, who at first tried to talk me out of it for a host of good reasons, but he saw I was pretty committed to the project. 

The thing that helped push this forward was a neat product I found called EliminatorTrack. This product actually made it really easy to get the studs going, and begin the construction on this little 'Day #2' project in the home after we moved in. I began doing the installation myself after work, (and after class) and pretty soon had some semblance of a rough wall going up:

I knew to do this right, I'd need to insulate this wall very well, so I added a barrier of TorchSmooth, which is a heavy black roofing material without the little crumbs.  John and I used regular 90lb roofing material in the last house, and boy was that a mess to deal with!  I must have had little granules in my hair for a week. The TorchSmooth product is the way to go, and saves hundreds over other sound barrier type materials. You can see it going up on the picture below, under the sheetrock:

Here's a view from inside the room:

At this point, I could see the light at the end of the tunnel, I had a dedicated room, and I knew the sound isolation and quality were going to be vastly improved. However, I now had to start thinking about the riser design. Since I was fully committed to this wall, I was definitely going to go all the way with the dedicated theater room idea.  Building a riser wasn't the only consideration. With staged seating, you need lights for the steps, unless you want your guests faceplanting in the middle of a movie if they have to use the restroom. I also had to think about providing power to these chairs, since they were going to be powered recliners.  My simple plan of an open space theater design was turning into quite an involved project.

As I started to work out the design, I also began to realize the number of chairs I was ultimately going to be able to fit in the room. I figured I could get exactly 11 chairs, using the design I put together below, using the specs from the exact chair that I had picked out for the room:

My initial plan was to just buy 1 row of 4 chairs, but I somehow justified to myself that since I was doing a lot of the construction on this project myself and saving money, that I could afford a little weight on the ol' credit card, and would up buying all 11 chairs at once.  Part of the 'logic' for this choice was also to ensure that down the road, I wouldn't run into the problem of not being able to find the same chair, if that model were ever discontinued.  Wife approved, so a few grand later, and a few boxes stacked in the hallway for now....



Next post:  Riser construction

Home Theater.. Build-out

So around May 2009, the machines started digging, and before too long, we had a foundation, and the framing went up. Here are the early photos of the space on the foundation level:

The light you see in the room is coming from the sky, they still hadn't put the floor on the 1st level yet. The good news was, it looked like our ceilings in the basement were going to be 9 feet high, after the drop-ceiling was installed to cover any pipes, mechanical equipment, etc.!  Below you can see the rack closet under the stairs. The gear will face flush with the room, and the side access door is in the hallway behind the stacked sheetrock.

I knew there was going to be a lot of details as far as wiring, hooking up the screen etc., and timing was going to be critical, so I made a lot of notes on photographs and sent them to the builder to try to keep communication flowing betwen us. Here are a couple examples of some drawings I sent during the heat of summer. The humidity was leaving puddles everywhere.

Unfortunately, Jim wasn't all that savvy with e-mails, so I wound up having to visit the house almost every morning before work to make sure that we were clear on what needed to happen, and when as far as the wiring, and other support details for things like the screen, etc.

So here is a view inside the AV closet. I came to the house myself and did all of the pre-wiring for the speakers, the screen, and I attempted to 'future proof' the house, by having the builder installing two large pipes that went from the basement all the way up to the attic, so I could drop wires into any room at a later date.  The orange stuff below is ENT tubing that I installed after work one night to make it easy to get wires in and out of the closet.

Here is what it looked like after the sheetrock.  (I think I gave the sheetrock guy a heart attack when he saw this room!... Well, I looked at it this way, he was getting paid well in a rough economy. How many new houses are going up in 2009?!)
 

A few more shots of the sheetrock, and it starts looking like a room.

The shot above shows the view from the front of the theater back towards the office area, with the fireplace, and french door to the back yard.


Next up:  The completed room (or so we thought...)

Home Theater: The New Beginning

I think that pictures are worth a thousand words, so I'm going to try to focus on using more pics to describe the new build, and less words. I'm not the most abbreviated individual if that's not obvious, so we'll see how successful I am ;)

The new theater was again, going to reside in the basement. I wanted to make sure that this theater was going to be at least as big as the last one.  Here is the floor plan of the basement that I originally designed and gave to the builder:

And here is a close-up of the space at the top-left that will become the new theater:

I originally envisioned the room as more open spaces, then separate rooms, and eventually the theater became one large long space.  When we got around to actually framing the basement, we managed to tuck the AV closet under the stairs, and provide a side  door for access along the hallway. Sweet!  This meant that the room could be one long room that went from one end of the house to the other.  At the time this seemed sensible, to maximize flexibility. I read somewhere that 'open' basement spaces are better for entertainment flow, and I thought it would work fine to have the theater at one end, and a bar, pooltable, etc., on the other. Later however, this didn't prove itself out from a sound and space perspective, which I'll discuss later.

Home Theater.. The History

Okay, so here we go on the HT chronicle.  I suppose that I really need to frame this story with some background. We just moved to a house in Trumbull Ct, which was brand new. I mean, literally, when we bought the home, there was an empty lot with a home yet-to-be-built in it's place. How cool was it opportunity to basically build a house from scratch? well very, but it did come with it's share of headaches.  For example, we had to vacate our prior home, and rent for about 5 months while this thing was being built. Moving twice in the same year, when you have two young kids, and are going to night school is a real exercise in both physical and mental fortitude. However, I digress..   In our last home, we lived there for about 10 years, and never finished the basement. Mostly because we had no money, but eventually we figured out how to fund the project, and a core element (for me) was to build a proper 'man cave'.  Long story short, my buddy John Bianchi, generously helped me with all aspects of the build-out, and a few months later, we wound up with what was a really cool home theater, that probably was way cooler than what the overall house deserved for a little starter home down by the beaches of Milford Ct.   Here is a link to a flickr album of the first theater we built:

This really was a lot of fun to build.  The irony was that as soon as we completed this project, after 10 years of living there, my wife Mary started hinting that she was tired of living in Milford. Now I really don't think words can describe my feelings at that moment, other than to say that I was contemplating if I had to choose between my wife and the man cave, ... lets just say it took a big toll on the ol' grand scheme of life choices that we all have to make at one time or another. . Thankfully we did get to enjoy the theater from about 2005 till 2008, so I can't really say that I didn't get to enjoy the fruit of my buddy and my efforts for a good long time, as we all did as a family, particularly after we had a couple of kids. 

So the time eventually came to move on from the starter home, as the little house was bursting at the seams after our 2nd little one came along.   As with any decision to move, I had a couple of proviso's, a few quid-pro-quo's if you will, to seal the deal on a re-location:  1.) I need space for a NEW mancave. and 2.), I need to have property to ride the trials bike above.  I didn't care about anything else. Well, I did, but they were far lower on the totem pole as far as I was concerned.  Mary wanted an office, a lot of light, and a few other wifey things like a nice kitchen, jacuzzi tub, etc.  With the chance to build a new home, we literally were aforded the chance to have it all. (I did however have to truck in some big boulders for riding, as the yard was pretty flat...).   Next post:  The New Beginning

Self Profiling Excercise

I know this is supposed to be a blog about my little HT project, but first I googled myself as part of an MBA class exercise that promotes internet self-awareness. The idea is to be cognizant of, and potentially react to, various pieces of information that may be 'out there' on you... I wasn't really sure what would come up, (I was relieved to see there do not appear to be too many Rob Cavaleri porn stars out there though...)

Click Here for Video

I first was interested in the 'other Rob Cavaleri's out there. There is one fellow who appears to be way into off-roading, and is contemplating weather a 302, 345, or 392 motor is right for his next monster truck project.  (I'd go with a 405 big block personally..)   There's a  Robert 'Cavalieri' (not quite the same last name) who is an endodontist that has a really cool website name for his practice:  'drcav.com'... sort of makes me wish I was going for my Phd instead...    Oh well. Something to think about if business school and animation don't work out.   As for myself,  there's a flurry of different things out there, covering a pretty vast span of activities. There's several YouTube videos of my half-way decent attempts at trials riding up some pretty big rocks, such as the one on above (click the text below pic for video..).   There is of course the typical LinkedIn references;  I've been working in animation for about 17 years, I've accumulated a pretty good sized list of contacts.  Of course like everybody, I've got a Facebook profile,  no beer pictures from college, but I did have a picture tagging war with a co-worker, where we uploaded goofy pics to a sub-heading 'Rob's Co-workers', and then tagged various images we found on the web said co-workers name as 'My Friend George'..  Imagine Mr T. sitting in  Santa Clause garb, holding an old lady on his knee. Click here if you must...  Let's see, aside from the videos and social networking stuff, there's a decent number of articles and websites that have information about my Filmography. I've worked on about a dozen projects that are listed on the IMDB, although not all the projects I've worked on are listed here. There's also some references to a couple of Siggraph papers that I wrote, and a really useful article on doing Crowd Simulation at Bluesky back in 2005 for the movie "Robots" written by of my co-workers wrote, who used to work for me in the effects dept. This is really good timing,  we have an upcoming project that requires crowd simulation, but we lost our old references!  Well, that just about covers the majority of the key pieces of info on the first 4 or so pages of a Google search on me. I suppose I'll need to check back on this more often, it was fun to see all of the surprise references in here.