Hi James.
After a few years of fun with Home Cinema, I decided to go for it last year, and get an extension to my home.
It was a 4 bed detached, with room above the garage and breakfast room (which are on the right side of the house - running from front to back, with a roof over them that was lower than the roof over the rest of the house - hope that makes sense).
It's now a 5 bed detached with an en-suite.
I'll explain what we did - I know this isn't the "changing rooms" forum - but want to explain what we got for our money.
Most of upstairs was ripped apart (apart from 2 bedrooms). Main bedroom was made bigger, bathroom was moved, 3rd bedroom was shrunk a little but made into the en-suite off the main bedroom. Then, a new room was added at the front right (above the garage) - now bed 3 - 8ft6x8ft6. Cinema room was added behind this room (seperated by a new corridor) - Cinema room is 16ft9x8ft6.
Oh - and as the room below the cinema room didn't stretch to meet the rest of the back of the house, they had to build a substantial pillar to sit it on.
Cost - £45,000 - including carpetting / B&W 603's / 2xbathroom's /lighting etc. Payed the builder about £34k - the rest was bits n' bobs.
So - first off, it might sound pricey, but for adding a new bedroom and 1 en-suite - (to a high spec), it was well worth it!
Now onto the interesting stuff if you're still awake!
The cinema room - as you look through the door:
Left wall = previous end wall - brick
Right wall = new end wall - brick
Far wall = back wall - brick
other wall = plasterboard either side - seperated by 4" gap filled with rockwool. Firecheck door to help keep the noise in.
Added a thick deep-red/maroon carpet, painted walls and ceiling a similar colour.
Bought QED wall sockets - that take either 1 or 2 pairs of banana plugs. 2 sockets at rear of room for 7.1 u/grade. 1 at either rear / side for surround speakers, others at front left for connecting to amp. I installed QED Qudos cabling in the walls and up along roof floor, before the walls were rendered.
So - you should have the picture of an empty room, with various sockets for plugging in speakers, dotted around. At the front of the room, there's also 4x2 socket M&K filtered plug sockets - which have filters that need to be changed every couple of years - they cut out radio frequency interference as well as being anti-surge/spike etc. Downstairs by the fuse box is a "Furse ESP" unit, where the main supply goes into this box, then out into the fusebox. This stops spikes/surges/electrical overvoltages - basically ensuring a smooth supply to the whole house (£230).
The room of course has a window (law), which has a black-out blind in front, and a room height/width pair of thick black curtains to cut out any light and stop some of the sound bouncing around.
Onto the kit:
Father in law and I installed a 70"wide 16:9 Da-Lite modelB screen with CSR (customised as it needed to be smaller than their min CSR screen) - £320ish. The CSR is controlled screen return - i.e. when you pull it down to return the screen into the housing, you can let it go and it will slow down and "close" smoothly.
Either side of the screen are B&W 602's (the 603's are used downstairs with the hi-fi, as they have more of an impact there than they do with the kit upstairs). By the right 602 is an M&K VX7-MkII sub. Under the screen (between the skprs) is a £42 Ikea unit, which has room for 3 wide x 2 high standard kit. From left to right is : Denon 3802 (bought 2 days ago - anyone want to buy a mint condition Yamaha A2?), Panny DVD-A310 (US, chipped for R1-6), B&W CC6 centre, Dreamcast, Panny Nicam VCR, telewest dig cable box. Not bad, £42 to house that lot eh?
On top, is a 32" Goodmans - YES, GOODMANS 50hz TV. Bought it 5 months ago, and it's a great picture, NTSC compatible, does everthing I want!
To the rear of the room, are a pair of Mission 77DS speakers - either side and above the listening position, and as of last night - a pair of Kef Q8 surrounds, mounted behind and above - 3ft6ins apart. Surrounds all have main drive units 7ft high - where they sound perfect.
For watching films, i've borrowed a Panasonic 1024x768 projector - can't recall exact model, but it's the size of a shoe box, quiet, and fills my 78" wide screen just perfectly.
There's really only room for just my wife and I (in our leather chairs with seperate footrests - like the "Ekornes" chairs, but £200ish, not £1100ish!) - though we've had 4 people in total with clever usage of bean bags.
Sound from outside the room (with it plenty loud enough thankyou inside) is very quiet from all over the house - though directly below in the b/fast room, you can really hear the bass in particular, and can make out a fair bit. Outside the house is fine at the sides, though if you're sat in our back garden you can hear stuff going on.
Sorry to have used your thread to finally get this all down - I was a keen member of this forum a year ago, when I was specking everything out. In the end, I used advise from here and other places to do it all myself (with help from Father in law) - reckon i've saved a stack, and that it wouldn't have been half the fun if someone else had done it.
I hope this gives you some food for thought / understanding?!?
Please do feel free to pose any questions you think I may be able to answer!!
I'll get me arse in gear soon, take some digital pics, and put them up on a site, in case anyone's interested in having a peek!
Cheers.
Nick.