Until we started planning the basement, I never thought we would have a cinema room in our house. We attended the Parade of Homes Utah several years in a row and many of those mansions had BIG! GIANT! KITCHENS! and master bedrooms that could fit the entirety of my first apartment. Still, a large portion of them had theater rooms. Which looked almost exactly like a miniature theater or the screening rooms you see on Entourage. I remember thinking simultaneously how nice it would be to have one, and how impractical it would be to have one.

When I presented the idea to Chad, I knew we didn’t have the kind of space for a legitimate screening room. But I thought it might be somewhat practical, given these *unprecedented times* – most overused phrase of the year, to have a smaller cinema room. With Chad excited, I set out to create a miniature and simplified home theater room. I tried to cull what I liked the most about all those rooms we had seen, and whittled it down to:

• Theater Chairs
• Wall Sconces
• Strip Lighting
• Platform for raised seating

The space we had was a rectangle with a window and a door.

I started putting everything together so I had a better idea of how things would look.

The very first thing we had to order were the chairs, because they were estimated to need 10-12 weeks to arrive. At the time we were slated to be finished with the project in early October. But this wasn’t my first rodeo, I knew better, and here we are at the beginning of December with the end nowhere in sight. I still figured having the chairs early was better than waiting to have them once the room was finished. And we had a little bit of storage space for them. I mean, why else do we have a four car garage? No, seriously, I’m asking. I still don’t know.

In the end of August, just in case we were actually going to be done in a month as the contractor kept stating, I ordered the curtains, the blinds, the light fixtures, and gave the paint samples to the painter. When we picked out carpet and had it installed just before Halloween, I thought that maybe … MAYBE, we were close to being done. I’m so optimistic for absolutely no reason.

Obviously the room also needed either a television or a projector, but that was something I was expecting Chad to handle, because I don’t care. After many months of research and pricing and going back and forth (with himself), he finally settled on a “big enough” TV for now with the option to swap it out later. One of the last things I ordered for the basement was a media console because the size of the console depended on the size of the TV. Despite me originally thinking it would be SO COOL to have nothing at all, we did need something to fit the gaming console, the cable box, and our collection of DVDs we never seem to be able to get rid of despite the fact that we maybe watch one a year.

While the basement project in its entirety seems to be a never ending ordeal, this room only required walls, flooring, a window frame, paint, and electricity. Meaning that although the remainder of the basement, as of this writing, still isn’t completed; this room crawled across the finish line just before Thanksgiving. We took advantage of Chad’s time off from work to bring the chairs carefully downstairs (so as not to damage the new walls and wet paint) and put them together. We hung the blinds, the curtains, and spent a lovely afternoon cutting holes in the brand new walls to hide the various cables we needed to run from the entertainment unit to the TV.

After several days of putting together furniture, vacuuming, placing artwork, installing wall mounts, and hooking up electronic gadgets, we had a finished cinema room that we could use. While the basement continues to be worked on around us.

There are several mini projects I need to resolve. For instance, I need an extension clip for the strip lighting on one side and I found out after installing all the other strips that they don’t sell them yet. Shipping will begin in February 2021.

Another to-do item is that the roku, which is far tinier than I imagined when I ordered it, refuses to stick to the TV no matter how many 3M strips I adhere to it. So it just dangles off of the TV, real classy like. And doesn’t drive me crazy at all, nope.

The final mini project I’m currently working on is sorting out the artwork. We settled on the movie poster that should fill the vacant spot next to the Back to the Future poster, but hunting it down and framing it will be a chore for next year.

That’s one room done, four to go.