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Product Review Sound & Vision Magazine, October 2008
The House that Jim Built (James Wilcox) Evaluation of ezFrame (R106WH1)
The House That Jim Built, Part 3
At long last, our intrepid DIYer finally gets his home theater
www.elitescreens.com/reviews
By James K. Willcox
October 2008
Edward Smith
Has it really been 2 years since I last wrote about my efforts to install the A/V and
networking systems in the new addition to my home? (See “The House That Jim
Built,” June 2006, “The House That Jim Built: Part Two,” September 2006, and the
Web-exclusive prequel to this story, The Basement Home Theater Jim Built in the
House that Jim Built). It’s hard to imagine that much time has passed, but despite
some dumb mistakes along the way, I have to say I couldn’t be happier with the
result. When you do a lot of the work yourself, you pick up an incredible amount
of knowledge about what goes into building a dedicated home theater — things
I never learned from just profiling them for magazines. The previous articles
detailed my experiences running wire and installing gear as my wife Lisa and I added a living room and bedroom to
our riverfront home 30 miles north of New York City. Stealth, rather than high-end performance, was the priority, as our
view of the Hudson River is the real star of these rooms. And with considerable help from Hudson Valley Home Media in
nearby Sparkill, NY (among other things, owner Barry Weiner had to rescue me from an electrician’s bad low-voltage
wiring job), my wife and I successfully met our home-entertainment goals for that part of the house.
But the basement we added at the same time was my chance to go wild — or
at last as wild as a man with a toddler, a mortgage, and a limited budget can
afford to go. I was determined to transform the basement into a kick-ass home
theater, with a small recording studio to boot.
As you can see in the “before” picture on the right, building the home theater
was a fairly significant DIY project. The room was completely unfinished, with a
poured-concrete floor and walls, a large HVAC unit, exposed ductwork, plumbing
and electrical lines, and an oddly formed knee-wall that abutted the old
basement. While the project took almost 2 years to complete, I spent a lot of time
thinking about it, buying the tools I’d need, and doing research. The actual
construction lasted about 8 months, since I did most of the work at night and on
weekends.
My original plan was to divide the basement in half across the length of the
room, creating a space for the theater and another, separate one for the recording studio. I had the basement excavated
a foot deeper than usual so I could have 9-foot ceilings; that would give me some leeway for ceiling-mounting
a projector, and would also give me enough clearance to install a dropped acoustic-tile ceiling. To handle the room’s
high-voltage requirements, I had the electrician install a large electrical sub-panel near the central HVAC unit. And
since he knew my plans, Barry installed a big enough distribution panel in the old basement’s demarcation area to
handle all the additional A/V and networking hook-ups I’d need.
IT'S HAMMER TIME
With a plan now firmly in mind, I began construction, starting with the floor. Moisture is always a concern in a basement,
and since my guitar collection would be down there, keeping things dry was especially critical. While I could’ve laid a
carpet over a padded vapor barrier directly on the concrete, I instead installed a floating sub-floor using interlocking
2-foot-square DriCore panels, which have raised polyethylene cleats that elevate the panels off the floor, allowing any
moisture that might wick up from the concrete to evaporate before reaching the surface.
To help with the framing, I hired a local handyman, Michael Reizenstein (who was also a licensed electrician), and
together we framed the room’s perimeter walls. Since the concrete knee-wall was well off true, we narrowed the angle
to 80 degrees, which made it look more parallel while helping to minimize room resonances that can come with
perfectly squared walls. Above the concrete knee-wall, we added three sets of shelves to hold my CDs.
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