Booth Bijou Garage Theater

[MEB]

First, let me say that, acoustically speaking, I fully realize a garage is not the ideal place to set up a home theater. Particularly our garage, which has a plastic floor. But our regular home theater room (our living room) is too small to comfortably seat more than 4-5 and my wife and I sometimes like to entertain a larger crowd. So, thus began the idea of temporarily converting our garage to a home theater. (Temporarily, because, we actually use our garage to park our cars.)

Thanks to a "garage makeover" I did about 5 years ago, our garage is actually an attractive place to hang out:




I've long since wanted to set up a home theater out there, but really didn't know how I wanted to go about it (other than it had to be something I could put up and take down fairly easily). Then, a few months ago, I came up with the idea of putting speaker and HDMI wall jacks behind the home theater gear in our living room, and connecting those jacks to matching jacks in the garage:




Those jacks allow me to easily move our existing front speakers and subwoofer out to the garage, and still connect them to our existing A/V receiver (and other gear) in the living room. And since all of our home theater gear was already set up to be controlled by RF remote, it's a piece of cake to control it all from the garage.

Or course, I did need to spend some money on a screen and projector. For the screen, I got a manual 120" 4:3 Accuscreen model for $150 on Amazon. For the projector, I was fortunate to find a used Sharp DLP model on eBay for $320. It's native resolution is 1024x768 but it does handle 720p and 1080i. The combo actually looks amazingly good, particularly for a total investment of less than $500. I mounted the screen to the ceiling in the garage using hooks. I found a projector ceiling mount for $45 on Amazon, one that could be pivoted up out of the way when not in use.

Those items, combined with the wall jacks, speaker wire, and some banana plugs brought the total expense to less than $650. Not too bad for occasional use and the ability to seat up to about 25 people and give them a nice "Booth Bijou" home theater experience:




Here's how it looks with the lights off (well, all but one light):




I've posted several more photos (with captions) to a photo gallery at my photo site. Including, photos of our living room gear, the surround speakers in the garage, and our Booth Bijou "Snack Bar" set up:

http://www.thephotobooth.net/Booth-B...58288909_wQQPL

That gallery also includes an 8-minute video (a recording of the actual screen image) demonstrating some of our Booth Bijou custom intros and other pre-movie entertainment. I run all of the intros and trailers from a Mac Mini home theater PC (controlled by a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse). Before I start the show, I have the main feature queued up and on pause in the Blu-ray player. When the pre-movie entertainment is finished, I activate a macro on my RF remote to switch the A/V receiver from the Mac Mini to the Blu-ray player. It works like a charm and really helps to emulate the whole "movie theater" experience. Our guests love it!


UPDATE: In October 2012, we added curtains, a new projector, and new surround speakers:










The projection screen is a 120" 4x3 screen. But now we only pull it down far enough to create a 16x9 aspect. That gives us a 105" screen. With a couple of chairs in place and the side lights on, this is what it looks like:




And with the side lights off:




UPDATE: In January 2013, we added a popcorn machine:





Mark