Last week the last drapes were installed in the home theater, and the room is finally done. We’re quite pleased with the result, in an outrageous kind of way. The room was purposely designed to be so different from the rest of the house that you cannot but help feel transported into another world, which to me is really what home theater is about. The red drapes, the gold-colored moldings, the cornices and the crystal wall lamps are reminiscent of late 19th century Paris. The drapes also hide from view custom-built DVD shelves.

At the rear of the room, on top of the raised floating floor, is the reclining theater seating. The Velodyne subwoofer is placed behind the seating and rumbles the flooring (and seating) quite nicely during bass-rich scenes. I’m still trying to decide if I like the fairly directed surround sound coming from the angled Dynaudio speakers in the corners, or if I should add brackets and have the speakers face each other for a more diffuse sound.

The star ceiling provides a kind of "outdoorsy" feeling when watching movies and all the other lights are off. We didn’t place too many stars and the light is comfortably subdued, so we typically just leave the star ceiling turned on when we watch movies. Once your eyes have adjusted, the stars provide just enough light to find the popcorn.

A couple of small things still need to be worked on in this room. The aircon is just a little bit too noisy, but it’s due to a loose plastic panel which I’ll have to tighten up. The cooling fan that we ended up having to add inside the equipment cabinet in front is definitely too noisy, but considering the considerable heat generated by the Denon surround receiver and the Sony PS3 that I use as a Blu-ray player we really have little choice. One of these days I’ll have to add a temperature-dependent speed control on that fan, and maybe a baffle of sorts…

The house construction seemed to really have slowed down, the closer we got to completion. For several weeks now the house has looked as if it’s ready for us to move in, and yet there always seemed to have been something left that needed fixing. And then something more, and then something more… But now we’re really getting close - in fact we plan to move in by the end of next week. And after that the real fun begins - designing and building the home automation systems to connect to all the wiring I hid in the walls!  But more on that some other time. First we need to finish the house… 

The porch came out quite nice, once we got the steel supports mounted in the trellis above and the temporary post removed. We’re still working on getting the water feature around the porch working perfectly, so I suspect it’ll still be a month or so before we dare populate it with koi.

Finally all the floors are in. The material took several months to get, and we had all kinds of problems getting the colors we wanted, finding enough supply, etc, but in the end it took just a few days to install. We use an engineered hardwood that is available in several colors and uses a 7-ply cross-grain construction with real wood as its top layer, covered by 8 coats of a UV-cured high resistance coating. The dining room uses a rosewood tint; the rounded edge against the foyer gave us a special bit of headache. How to get a good rounded edge with no visible lines and a  rugged finish that can withstand years of wear and tear?  In the end we had it custom-carved out of a series of solid pieces of wood by a local sash factory.

We used engineered hardwood in the bedrooms on the second floor also. The basement floor, however, we expect to take a hard beating since we will use it as a workout area and people might be dropping weights on it. We also wanted a lighter colored material here to brighten up the room. We used laminated wood flooring, and this is what the basement looks like with our muay thai punching bag at the rear and my daughter’s ballet mirror on the right:

For my office we decided on a darker, more somber engineered hardwood. I felt that it’s more restful for the eyes and makes for a good contrast against the glass-and-chrome desk.

In my opinion the most interesting "room" is perhaps the smallest, least visible one: adjoining my office is the "hub" - really just a small closet with barely enough space to hold the home automation server, the routers, the media server, the PABX, and all the other equipment I plan to cram in there over the next few years. Into this tiny closet runs all the cabling from the rest of the house…