cerebros
Prominent Member
Hi folks
Thought I'd put up a thread in a semi-blog style about my forthcoming lounge redecoration and attempts to improve my home cinema experience as well as trying to turn part of the room into a mini man cave.
We've been in the house for 10 years now and haven't gotten round to doing much decorating - in fact this is the first room we're doing without there being a pressing need to do it (the first two rooms decorated were for our eldest daughter who went into the back bedroom and then decided, when given the choice last year prior to the birth of her baby sister, that she wanted to move into the second front bedroom). However, as a result of a recent remortgage we've got a little bit of spare cash floating around and so have decided now is the time to do up the lounge.
Aside from just freshening up the room (which may not have been decorated for at least five years before we moved in), aims for this project are (in no particular order):
When we moved in there was a gas back boiler in the chimney which was replaced a year or two after we'd moved in; however, there's still a lot of metalwork within the chimney which may cause problems running the cables down. I won't be able to check out the situation until I've been able to find someplace to put all the stuff currently in an IKEA bookshelf in front of the chimney and get the bookshelf out of the way so I can get a look up the chimney.
There's also some metal pipes in what was a built-in cupboard to one side of the chimney that I'm not immediately sure if I'll be able to remove (not sure if they're still hooked up to the gas or not), which would be a pain as I'm wanting to put shelves in that cupboard space to hold scanner and printers, as well as having data and power sockets on the bit of the cupboard wall that backs on to the chimney.
Thought I'd put up a thread in a semi-blog style about my forthcoming lounge redecoration and attempts to improve my home cinema experience as well as trying to turn part of the room into a mini man cave.
We've been in the house for 10 years now and haven't gotten round to doing much decorating - in fact this is the first room we're doing without there being a pressing need to do it (the first two rooms decorated were for our eldest daughter who went into the back bedroom and then decided, when given the choice last year prior to the birth of her baby sister, that she wanted to move into the second front bedroom). However, as a result of a recent remortgage we've got a little bit of spare cash floating around and so have decided now is the time to do up the lounge.
Aside from just freshening up the room (which may not have been decorated for at least five years before we moved in), aims for this project are (in no particular order):
- To finally get round to wall mounting the TV (where it'll be more out of reach of tiny hands) and also wall mounting my Jamo surround speakers
- As far as possible get speaker, data and power cables out of sight and out of the way and hopefully make things a bit easier to get to should I need to plug/unplug AV gear as well as a bit easier to clean around
- Sort out the room lighting so that the end of the room where we normally sit doesn't require us to have lamps on pretty much all the time in order to bolster the poor positioning of the main room light (in fact I want to get rid of the lamps altogether and replace them with downlights for those occasions when we do need extra light for doing our various hobbies)
- Turn one corner of the room into a quasi man-cave (since we now don't have a room I can turn into one) where I can at some point in the future put in a desktop PC for video and photo editing, as well as having my printers and scanners there.
- Try and find, build or have built, some suitable AV furniture to house all the components I've got (and plan to have) that will also hopefully allow us to get some additional storage
When we moved in there was a gas back boiler in the chimney which was replaced a year or two after we'd moved in; however, there's still a lot of metalwork within the chimney which may cause problems running the cables down. I won't be able to check out the situation until I've been able to find someplace to put all the stuff currently in an IKEA bookshelf in front of the chimney and get the bookshelf out of the way so I can get a look up the chimney.
There's also some metal pipes in what was a built-in cupboard to one side of the chimney that I'm not immediately sure if I'll be able to remove (not sure if they're still hooked up to the gas or not), which would be a pain as I'm wanting to put shelves in that cupboard space to hold scanner and printers, as well as having data and power sockets on the bit of the cupboard wall that backs on to the chimney.