Do It Yourself Home Theaters

Welcome to our home theater! It has been a never ending labor of love.

Information current as of

Home Theater Background

We bought our house in December 1999 specificially because it had a large room (16x40) above the 2000 sq foot garage that was perfect for a home theater. No windows, finished floor, unfinished walls. It was a definite theater in the rough, but it was the perfect project for two home theater enthusiasts. We made an offer on the house within 10 minutes of seeing that room.

Thousands of Dollars Later...

Since we could do most of the construction ourselves (only outsourcing the drywall) we saved a ton of money. That's a great thing because we have very expensive tastes.

This site is dedicated to our efforts on that wonderful haven, our own little "escape from reality." Home theaters are really wonderful additions to your house. During construction we focused on the following areas:

• Home Theater Seating
• Theater Projectors vs Big Screen Tvs
• The overall Theater Design
• What other theater furniture to get and where to put it

The great news is that we're mostly done with our theater, enough to use it anyway. There are still a few cabinets to install (built in units that we're building ourselves) but that's just an accessory at this point. If you're curious I've put pictures up so you can see the progress.

We spend a lot of time in our little theater. We've been looking for great names for the theater ever since we started building it, and so far our favorite is Hakunamatata from Lion King, which means "no worries." That's exactly how we feel when we're watching movies in there, wrapped in our cocoon of darkness and feeling the vibration of our 5.1 dolby digital surround sound rumbling beneath our feet. I can't imagine not having this theater.

Our home theater system includes:

• Kenwood Receiver, KR-X1000 THX
• Denon Dolby Digital Decoder, AVD 2000
• Denon DVD Player Model Denon DVD-1920
• Toshiba VHS Player, M784
• Mitsubishi Widescreen TV, WS 65819

If you're looking at putting in a home theater or are just wanting to spurce up your existing setup, I can't recommend this project highly enough. Yes, it was a lot of work, but totally worth it! We absolutely love it!

We recently had to replace our Mitsubishi DVD Player, I don't know if the laser went out or it just died. It started skipping something terrible. After a lot of research we found a Denon DVD play that we really liked. Amazingly we found it in stock at Ultimate Electronics in Tulsa. Got a good price on it, too.

Our movie watching time has diminished a bit in our home theater lately but it's still a major part of our life. I'm hoping to get Narnia soon, I've heard it's incredible and should be awesome on our widescreen TV.