I’ve been on a long road to creating a DIY home theater in my basement. Work, home disasters, chronic home repair problems, distractions, etc. have all served to turn this ‘home theater’ into a long DIY project.
The idea of a home theater is to greatly exceed what the public theater can afford a view. The concept is a dedicated space for watching content with the best picture-quality one can afford while controlling all of the environmental parameters such as light control.
As a first-experiment, the wife and I converted a bedroom into such a dedicated space. We love it! But, its also a big distraction in getting the basement finished and that formal home-theater completed. This idea of bringing home what was a traditional public-activity certainly changed our lives. We went from from 50-60 movies/year at the public theater to ~10/year when we got a 65″ RPTV, to ~2/year when the bedroom-conversion/experiment completed itself (92″ front-projection).
Have any of you considered such a dedicated space, and also considered the consequences as it may affect resale? Buying a home in Atlanta will start at $150K and typical prices for home-theater-equipped homes three years ago started at $750K and up. Now, a DIY home theater can be found in homes like mine ($250K).
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We have a home theater, and love it. We use it for TV watching, movies and sports. I think it improves the value of the home. The room is about 600 sf in a 3600 sf house, and for us its a great use of space.
In your development (if you're in one), has it had any impact on neighbors? I think someone said in my area (Atlanta), up until 4-5 years ago the idea of a home theater in a home below a given starting point ($750K-Million) was extremely uncommon. Now, with greater selections in consumer projectors at more aggressive pricing has resulted in several people within my development ($200K-250K when I moved in 5 years ago, and $250K-350K currently) have converted spaced to dedicated home theater rooms.
Five years ago I spent $4K on a 65" RPTV that was probably one of the best RPTV money could buy (listed for $5500), yet you can get into home theater front projection where the projectors start in the area of $2K. TTF, do you venture over to avsforum discussion forums? AVS, is Audio-Video Sciences, but that is a shop for A-V equipment and services. They started a forum several years ago and now have well over 100K members that are into home theater.
We live on a bit of property with an older home we are remodelling. We are however near a large development. The house is in the $500K range.
A lot of the new and remodelled, larger homes in the area (Portland, Oregon suburbs) have theaters. We bought his house a year ago, and in the process of looking at homes, I would guess 30% of the house we went into had them.
As far as the AV stuff goes, my 16 year old son does all the AV work. He tells me what to get, and takes care of it.
Thanks,
TTF