Zathras' Man-cave

[zathras]

Hello! hello hel h

awfully empty in here.. I will have to get crackin with some info about the man cave I built last year.

Don't tell my wife that it's a man-cave tho. When discussing with her it was a 'basement remodel', ok?

We started with a 50x25 unfinished basement and ended up with a wetbar, 100" home theater, poker area, storage room, bathroom, and workshop.

[pond007]

Looking forward to seeing it. I'm sure I've seen it before on the "other" forum and the "other, other" forum. Thanks for starting this out right.

[Quads]

Can't wait to see the work again!
Has been one of the most impressive so far.

[timsta007]

Sounds great. Get those pictures posted!

[Guma]

TTIWOP

Had to be done, sorry!

[Quads]

:ttiwwp:

Sorry.
Had to do it the right way

[Charlutz]

Hey, do you have any pics?

[zathras]

Hey, do you have any pics?

oh do I have pix!
I will get busy. Right now I am sitting here in the big-ass recliner, about 10' from the big-ass screen, just pulled a mug of Dos Equis, settling back for an evening of pokerstars and websurfing.. damn- I just missed the PS 8pm 'fiddycent' which a bunch of my pokergang plays in every nite..

oh well. wait- what's that on the big screen? OMFG, it's "Clean House" with Niecy Nash on the Style network... Please don't revoke my man-card... I'll make up for it later with the military channel or espn.

Anyway, I am going to re-live my basement adventure here, which began about a year ago- actually around June of '08. Hopefully I can inspire others to plan their own man-cave projects.

This is what the place looked like then. We had been in the house 2 years, and the basement was a catch all dirty, dingy, storage dump.

Here we are looking from the NE corner along the east wall. Behind me to my left is the exit up the outside stairwell to the back yard.

wait- where the hell are the tags for links n stuff? how do I post a pic- wtf am I doing wrong- I don't see stuff I'd expect..

http://www.zathras.com/pix/basement/preview_e_side_looking_s.jpg
aha.. figured it out.. had to type in the bracket img tags manually...

anyway, here's another shot, looking N along the opposite wall from the opposite corner.

http://www.zathras.com/pix/basement/preview_w_side_looking_n.jpg


So, this is what we started with.
Next up, the planning phase!

[zathras]

So, we have basically 25x50 to work with. There was a bit of negotiation as to exactly how it would all end up. She wanted a wine room. I wanted a theater. We both wanted a poker area. Yes, I'm a lucky guy - my wife is as addicted to poker as I am.

I used simple excel to diagram out my plans. I just made all the columns and rows identical size to form a grid where each square represented 1'x1'.
I color coded the immoveable objects such as the furnace, water heater, stairs, etc. Then I dropped in objects for doors, bathroom fixtures, etc.

http://www.zathras.com/pix/basement/floorplan.JPG

You will notice that I wanted a urinal in the bathroom. I did not win that battle. Life is about compromises. Speaking of which, Niecy Nash is over and we've got "How it's Made" on the big-ass screen. They're building speakers... coooool..

Anyway, the main goal, the selling point of the idea with my wife, was that we would have a nice poker room, so we wouldn't have to drag the tables up and down the stairs every time we hosted a game. I went thru a few different configurations before settling on the final version. Part of my constraint was that the stairs come down right smack in the middle, which really kinda sucked. But, I worked around it. I originally thought I might get 4 tables down here, but in reality we can only get 3, and then only if we move the furniture around. Oh well, we usually only use 2 at a time.
Somewhere along the way, I decided I wanted a big projection screen home theater area, and a wet bar. In the plan above, the bar is at the left side, and the theater is at the right side. So in effect, we ended up with a single large room, but it feels like several distinct areas.

We decided to finish only part of the basement. The workshop and storage are unfinished areas totalling around 300-400sf. Total finished area is about 850-900sf.

Another major consideration was build vs hire. I did a basement 2 houses ago. I have the basic knowledge and skills. And there's a lot of satisfaction to be gained by doing this kinda thing yourself.... But, you know, it would take me a year to do what a professional crew could do in a few months. So I got 3 companies to come in and give me estimates. One was substantially lower than the other 2, plus I knew the guy. So, he got the job.

I did however, decide that I wanted to do all the A/V stuff myself for my home theater. And when I say all the a/v stuff I mean all. I spent probably a month surfing and reseaching and then ordering all my stuff. Forums such as avs are incredible resources for this kind of research. I even ended up building my own projection screen. I bought and installed all my a/v cabling, projector, speakers, etc. By doing all this myself I figured that I saved about 4-6k on what the local a/v retailer would have charged.

I will continue posting the progress with plenty of pix over the next few days. Meanwhile I'm putting up some before & after pix over in the B&A section, for those who want to jump ahead! :)

[zathras]

We're now into August 2007, and the contracts are signed. The GC was in charge of the framing, walls, electrical, mudding, tile, plumbing, plus installing the cabinetry. I purchased the cabinetry for the bar and the bathroom from a guy I know who owns a kitchen/bath remodel business.
The carpet and furniture was purchased separately, towards the end of the project.

They told me they'd begin in a few weeks, but that turned into 2 months. But, in the meantime, I spent almost the entire month of Sept researching and buying all the AV stuff I would need.

To begin planning my theater setup, I took my excel layout and made a copy where I marked in various AV components.

In-wall speaker locations, an IR repeater, an xbox 360 hookup, a computer vga hookup, a projector, a screen, a receiver, directv box, dvd player, and an AV closet where everything would be located. Oh yeah, might as well put a tv by the bar and hook that into the system.

I researched whole-house automation, and pc-based controls, media servers (where you dump all your dvd's onto a hard drive and then just fire them up on your theater from a pc)- some very cool, sophisticated setups, but a little beyond what I was willing to put into it, both time-wise and $$-wise. I mean you can drop 10grand on a fancy Crestron system in the blink of an eye. yeah. no. maybe next house...

So, what I settled on, in no particular order was

Sanyo Z5 720p projector
8 JBL speakers-
Front L&R
Rear L&R
Front Center
Woofer
Zone 2 L&R (by the bar)
Yamaha HDMI receiver- 7.1 or 5.1 with zone2
Buffalo Electronics IR repeater and emitters
various single gang decora style wall plates for the HD15 (SVGA connector), HDMI, RCA jacks for the component connections, etc.
miles of cable


http://www.zathras.com/pix/basement/floorplan2.JPG

S1-S8 are speakers, P is the projector, C is a VGA+LR audio jack to plug the computer into, X is the xbox hookup, I is the IR repeater box, T is the component+LR for the bar TV. The green area is where the AV racks are in the closet under the stairs. The pink area is the wetbar, the orange area is tile, the yellow area is carpet.
I contemplated buying bulk spools of coax and cat6, and connectors, and then making my cables. From the rack, I needed to run:
speaker wire to 8 speakers, (~500 ft)
RG6 x 5 (component+LR) to the xbox (50')
RG6 x 5 (component+LR) to the bar tv (50')
RG6 x 2 (for LR audio) to the pc jack (50')
SVGA to the pc jack (50')
Cat6 to the IR box (50')
SVGA to the projector (25')
HDMI to the projector (25')
RG6 x 3 (for component) to the projector (25')

doesn't seem like I should need fiddy feet of stinkin wire to get to each of those places, but, by the time you go from the rack, over, up, along the beam, over, down, and have a few feet extra on each end, yeah, it's a lot of stinkin wire..

I ended up buying a spool of speaker wire, and buying pre-terminated (RCA) cables from Monoprice for everything else.

Oh yeah, and RG6 x 2 for the DTV box from the AV rack over to my 6x16 dtv splitter.

Then there's all the accessory things that you don't think of right off the bat if you've never done this before..

like speaker mount kits
http://www.zathras.com/pix/basement/day6_4.jpg

and wall boxes
http://www.zathras.com/pix/basement/day6_1.jpg

and cable ties, and all the special wall plates with HDMI, VGA, 3x RCA's, 5x RCA's, etc etc etc.

So, to wrap this post up, this phase of the project took me a month, from reading forums, to deciding what I needed to buy, to shopping around and buying it. I bought from 13 different sources online, plus Homedepot. Everything was ordered within about a 1 week period, and I even had a spreadsheet for all the stuff, where I bought it, when it was ordered, the tracking#'s, when it arrived, etc. It was kinda crazy for a few weeks there.
But finally, it all was in, and I even had a week or so to spare before they finally showed up to begin work on Oct 15th.