San Francisco Victorian

It’s been a lifelong dream of mine to have a home theater. The only problem is, who has space for an entire room dedicated to a home theater? Rather than create rooms with only one purpose, we build ours to entertain. This creates some really fun challenges. Above you can see the projector screen fully installed and lowered. I purchased the screen from Monoprice at a pretty good rate.

Below you can see what the room looks like with the screen retracted. Surprisingly, we’ve only had a few people notice it.

But first, we had to knock down a wall before we began. This wall was put up sometime after the house was built and had a tiny french door. This created a cramped space with very little light. As you can see below, the room is beginning to open up.

Once the wall was down we had to clean up the openings. We had wires running everywhere and even a few old gas pipes. After removing everything we built a soffit out of 2×4′s to house the screen and be bolted to the header.

Once the soffit was done we screwed it to the opening and made sure it was level. We also test fitted the screen just to be sure that everything worked as planned. Then we took 1/4″ sheetrock and covered the soffit in preparation for plaster and wallpaper.

Here’s a quick video of us testing the operation of the screen. Here you can also get a better look at the soffit.

As we had prepared for, the original header that we screwed the soffit to was not level; however, the screen had to be in order to operate properly. We ended up creating boxes and columns on the sides of opening anyway, we just made one an inch taller than the other. The beautiful thing is that they are so far apart that no one notices. This is one of those visual tricks that you need to use when your house is 100+ years old.

The columns are finger jointed poplar that I ordered from Pacific Columns. They came with proper instructions and were simple to put together. The hard pat for us was lining everything up with plumb bobs and measuring many times.

Voila! A small amount of work and a bunch of ingenuity made this a simple project. Not many people ever notice the screen and the columns really dress up the room and let in more light. Also, if you look closely at the photo below, you’ll see we built in speakers as well just to clear up floor space.

If you’d like to see more photos of the build, check out the Projector Screen photo set on Flickr.