Moving my home theater (1 Viewer)

[Andy_Bu]

Hi all,

My wife and I are recapturing our living room from our 5 year old daughter and want to move our home theater from the basement up to this room.

This room brings up some issues we never had to deal with in the basement

1) Windows - There is a ton of ambiant light in this room. Are there examples someone can point me to for electronic curtains or shades that can close to darken the room?

2) More importantly, we are concerned about the sound keeping our daugher awake since it is a floor closer to her bed room. Are their elegant ways to sound proof an existing room (perhaps by blowing special insulation into the walls or the ceiling?)

Andy

 

[Adam Gregorich]

My wife and I currently live in a tri-level home where the HT is directly under the master bedroom. We used blow in cellulose in the ceiling cavity, and it helped with mid-high frequencies, but not really with bass. as to blocking out the ambient light, most blind companies carry blackout blinds. For other solutions you could try smarthome.com. A lot depends on how much you want to spend and the WAF.

 

[Andy_Bu]

Thank you for the link I will check it out.

My wife has two requirements

1) The room be sound proof so that my daughter can sleep
2) The room look normal (ie have normal sheetrock, or blueboard walls)

She is willing to gut the inside of the room (walls and ceiling). Since she is willing to do that, I think I should be able to have good sound proofing put in the walls and ceiling and hopefully have her regular walls put up ater the sound proofing is in place.

Does anyone know if I take the tactic of gutting the inside walls and ceiling, whether I will be able to achieve a good level of sound proofing?

Andy

 

[Adam Gregorich]

If you are going to gut the walls, there a few other options available. In the Nov 03 Home Theater Builder Mag (The Pilot Project part 7), they used a product called Acoustiblock. It is very heavy, and expensive, but something you could install yourself. Before you spend any money on soundproofing, I would set up the theater in your living room and see how loud it really is in your daughters room when you are watching a movie at typical volume. You may find that you don't need to do anything which will save you a lot of time, $$ and aggrivation.

 

[Phaelon]

If you're going to gut the room you might consider putting in a staggered doubel ceiling arrangement, provided you have high enough ceilings to permit this. In combiantion with standard unfaced fiberglass insulation, the double staggered sheetrock and stud arrangement works wonders in walls. Not sure what the issues are in doing a ceiling this way but it's worth considering.

By the way... spend the extra few $$ for fireproff sheetrock when doing the ceilings. It has added fiber strands that make it less likely to flex or bow whjenyou're using insulation above it that rests ont he sheetrock. This is more crucial in upstairs ceiling that have 24" on center trussed above them but if you're putting thick insulation between ceiling and the second floor, it will likely be helpful.

 

[Andy_Bu]

You can hear the base VERY clearly today in my daughters bedroom with the theater in the basement so it is only going to get worse when I move up a level to the first floor.

The only way we will go through with the move is if we can get some sound proofing into the room.

Andy