Before the sheetrock goes up -- pre-wiring, HVAC, etc.

I'm looking for suggestion for things I should think about before my new house is built, things that are easier and cheaper to do before the sheetrock goes up, or any other cool ideas for a house that aren't hugely expensive -- we're already spending enough as it is!

The floor plan is pretty much set at this point, building permits have been obtained, and in the next week or work on the foundation should begin. Nothing too radical can change.

Things I'm already planning:

• CAT-6 for gig Ethernet to most rooms. I'll have wi-fi too, but it's still great to have fast wired connections.
• Dual RG-6 coax, which will support either cable TV + rooftop antenna, or the dual coax used for dual-tuner satellite boxes.
• Even though I think I'll be dumping DirecTV and going back to Comcast cable, so I can do real Tivo with CableCARD, I'd like to pre-wire the attic for a future possible satellite dish and rooftop antenna.
• It almost seems old-fashioned now, but plenty of wired telephone jacks.
• Pre-wire for AC power and HDMI in the middle of the ceiling of my home theater, in case I decide to do a front projector, and pre-wire for surround sound speakers too.
• Central sucking (what I like to call central vacuum).
• Adding a humidifier/dehumidifier to the central forced air heating/cooling system. (One coworker warned me, however, that she'd heard stories from friends who'd ended up disconnecting humidifiers because of mold growth problems in ductwork.)
• Our builder will put in some sort of home security system as a standard feature, but I've never researched such things enough to know if I'd want to enhance the default system or not, or just leave that as-is.

One thing I won't do: pre-wire for multi-room audio using speaker cables. I used to love that idea, but Ethernet is a much better way to distribute audio now, and video too.

Three things I'm considering:

• Running fiber optic cable if it's not too expensive. I might not bother installing any optical jacks now, just leave the fiber behind the wall near the wall plates for the RJ-45 Ethernet jacks.
• Some sort of home control system for lighting. I don't know much about this yet, however.
• HEPA filters -- another thing I don't know much about now, how expensive or effective home versions are, but our current house can get pretty dusty and we have two cats and two rabbits, so there's a lot of fur in the air sometimes. The central vacuum should help keep dust down more than regular vacuum cleaners, however, or so the advertising claims say. Maybe that's enough, without special air filtering.

I'd love to do solar heating and power, but it's still way too expensive for me -- unless you know of something that's cheaper than what I've heard of. If eventually I can afford it, all I'd have to do is convince a majority of five other households in a small six-home association.

We are doing what we can to improve the efficiency of the house, with 2x6 exterior walls, paying a few thousands extra for better insulation, double-pane windows (those I think might even be required by code at this point), and an updated HVAC system that will easily be more efficient than what we have in the current house.

We're already planning outlets in most of the closets, and recharging things was one of the considerations.

Two closets are actually going to function as "pet bathrooms" for the cats and rabbits, with pet-sized doors for the pets, and larger doors for human access for cleaning.

There's a good idea. I'd thought a lot about sound deadening for the room I'll be using as a home theater, but I hadn't thought about that. Better than a deliberately very noisy fan for masking noises.

Now there's an idea... a terrible idea that I won't use, but an idea nevertheless.

There are a few pocket door in the plan, but alas, they are completely manual and whooshless.

Sort of, but a dedicated dehumidifier can save energy for you by making the air more comfortable at a higher temperature. With my current lack of a dehumidifier I often find the AC makes the air a little uncomfortably cool by time it gets comfortably dry enough for sleeping.


I've been thinking about having a dedicated home theater room for many years now, and finally being able to do really good speaker placement -- something very hard to do in the typical living room or family room -- is one of the biggest reasons for having the dedicated room.

What I haven't decided yet is if I'll splurge on a really good front projector right now, and if I use front projection, whether I'll do an acoustically transparent screen with the center channel placed behind it, or go for a more typical higher-gain screen with the center placed below it. I might just do a 72" rear projector at first. The room is designed so that there's an equipment closet behind the front of the room, and a rear projector can be recessed into the wall so that it's flush to the wall like a flat screen -- only much, much cheaper than a flat screen of the same size.

Since I'll have a 15'x24' room, it's hard to resist the idea of going for a 100" diagonal screen. But besides the cost for a good projector (like this Sony), I'm still not sure I'm happy about the picture brightness I'd get with a front projector on a screen that big, especially using the lower gain acoustically transparent screen.

Another reason I might hold off on buying a front projector now is that I'd like to see how far LED technology might go as a light source in front projectors. Samsung has gotten some pretty good results using LED for rear projection, LED is much more energy efficient than incandescent projector lamps, and LED gets rid of the problem of replacing those lamps.

The Sony I really like (from what I've read in reviews -- haven't seen one in person yet) uses a lamp that costs $1000 to replace, and is only rated for 1000 hours of service.


Wi-fi certainly isn't as good as gig ethernet for moving large files, and I routinely do back-ups where wired speed makes a HUGE difference, even over 802.11n.


Are those things heavy? I wouldn't mind myself, but I don't do most of the vacuuming. She who does would rather drag a long hose than a heavy vacuum cleaner. We'd end up buying three of these to have one on each floor.


We have a builder. We found someone who was creating a small six-unit development, who was willing to take one of their standard plans and do quite a bit of customization for a great price. For only a few thousand dollars extra, for example, the basement is being built a full foot deeper to give us better ceiling height for the theater, which will have a raised platform in the back section.

I was definitely planning on a patch panel. If you're using RJ45 ports, do you need some sort of RJ45->RJ11 adapter for use with a standard telephone? Maybe I'm not being imaginative enough, but it seems to me I'd be pretty happy with one CAT6a cable plus one 4-conductor phone line, each terminated with RJ45 and RJ11 jacks, respectively.


We're only two people living in this house, but we're going to have five bathrooms, four of which you can take a bath in. It insane. The top floor has dual master suites, each with their own bathroom. Those two bathrooms have their own shower stalls, but share a jacuzzi tub between them, Jack-and-Jill style. I guess I'd call that two 7/8 baths.

With the top floor, ground floor, and basement each having a "public" bathroom, that gets us up to five bathrooms. Crazy, but it's only costing a few thousand dollars extra and the end result will be awfully convenient, and all the bathrooms will be a good selling point if this house is every sold to a bigger family.

I specified an extra pocket door in the floor plan of the top floor which will allow a guest in our guest room to close off public access to the other bathroom, making the guest room and bath a small private suite.


It would $800 per hose I think (not sure of the exact pricing), so I don't know if it's worth the expense considering we'd need at least three of them, but there's a cool retractable hose system that can fit into a 2x4 wall cavity.

I'm wondering if I'm going to make our builder's head explode when he sees the drawing below.

I hope we're not trying his patience too much with all of our design tweaks. I didn't want to suggest any more floor plan changes at this point. Nothing has been built yet, however, so I want to make this suggestion while I can, even if it's a crazy idea, and even if it comes a little annoying late in the planning process.

I started thinking about two-piece rear projection instead of front projection, but the challenge has been finding a high-quality projector with short enough a "throw" to create a big picture with less than five feet of throw being available, which is all the throw I could get from behind the screen in the previous floor plan.

Since a short throw hugely limited projector choice, and/or meant smaller screens or expensive tricks with adapter lenses or mirror systems of unknown picture quality, I decided to play around with the idea of simply creating a bit more throw room:



The change I made was to add a "projector alcove" to the equipment room of the home theater. The alcove would end up underneath the front porch, and I don't know if this would introduce any big structural challenges or not. I also made what I call the "equipment closet" 6' deep, up from 5', which makes the theater proper a little smaller, but still leaves it a good size.

I may not go as big as an 8'-wide screen (that's 110" diagonal for 16:9) at first because of the trade-off between screen size and brightness. Since I'm picky about color quality I'm thinking about using a Sony VPL-VW200, which is a great projector but a bit shy on total light output. Cheaper but brighter alternatives seem to suffer a lot from inaccurate color, at least from the reviews I've read.

It's very hard to find many projector demos of different brands locally so that I could judge for myself in person what's going to satisfy me for picture quality.

By the way, thick walls with good acoustic insulation, plus heavy doors with weather stripping, are being used to help sound-proof the theater. Even though the theater is in the basement near the furnace and other utilities, it should be very quiet.

I'm hoping that a head-on view of the minimum projector alcove I'll like to have will help make the idea look less daunting that perhaps the original overhead floor plan view might have done, so I just e-mailed him the sketch below. I've also told the builder I'd be willing to pay up to $5000 for this modification, because it's easily worth that for the wider selection of less expensive projectors and screens that will work for me if I can have 12' of throw to play with.

This sketch represents the 15'-long section of foundation wall at the back of the equipment closet. The light blue outline represents the maximum 8'x4.5' screen size that I'm planning for, traced through from the theater wall in front of this wall.



This must be painfully non-metric for all of the non-Americans on this forum, except the Brits and some of their other former colonists.

The theater is in the basement, so this would be more like a very short underground tunnel than a window box. It just needs to be a concrete shell. No power outlets or special cabling are needed -- a long extension cord will suffice and long HDMI cable running along the floor will suffice. The whole thing is hidden from view, and does not need to look pretty. A 5'x3'x7'-3" box, with a full 5'x3' opening at one end, won't need any special ventilation at all.


With a few inches to spare -- I've worked out the geometry. If the builders can't place the alcove precisely relative to the finished theater, however, they'd be better off adding a few extra inches of height and width to be on the safe side.


How short is short? The smallest throw ratio I've found in a stand-alone 1080p projector so far was 0.75, but this appeared to be a very expensive projector where you have to find a dealer and contact them for a price. Among all of the 1080p projectors for which I've found good reviews, I haven't seen any throw ratios below 1.3, often not lower than 1.4. One of the recently highly-rated projectors at projectorcentral.com, the InFocus IN83, when zoomed to the max has a throw ratio of 1.85, which means it would have to be nearly 15' away from an 8'-wide screen.

It might be possible to find shorter throws among 1024x768 data-grade projectors, but that won't help me here. When screen sizes get much larger than 50" diagonal, the difference between 768 lines and 1080 lines becomes important.

I found some adapter lenses for nearly $2000 which increase picture size by 50%, which is the same as cutting throw by 33%, but I have no idea what effect on picture geometry, color refraction, or light output such lenses would have.

Even if I could achieve a very short throw, a short throw also requires special, more expensive screen material so that light hitting the screen near the edges of the screen, at a shallow angle, is refracted properly to shine mostly forward on the other side of the screen. A 110" lenticular screen built to the same specs as even a cheap one-piece rear projector screen would cost a fortune, would be expensive to ship (you can't roll or fold them), and might be impossible to navigate through doors and hallways into your house.


Another reason I'd rather go for a low-tech $5000 hole in the ground.


The street price of a VW200 is more like $11K. I might also consider a JVC DLA-RS2, which lists for $8K. (I haven't seen any trustworthy lower street prices yet.) I could go quite a bit lower in price with something like a Panasonic PT-AE2000, but I don't know how satisfied I'd be with that based on some of the negative points I see brought up in reviews.

Ah, nothing like high-tech problem solving techniques:



Just in case my strange projector alcove isn't feasible, which is likely, I was wondering just how much I could achieve using a first-surface mirror, still assuming a throw ratio of 1.5. The easiest way I could think of to figure out a workable light path was to draw it out on paper and physically fold the paper to represent the mirror placement, with the fold starting a little short of a line drawn through the light path representing the back wall of the room behind the screen.

I scaled down my max screen size to 80"x45" -- if I can't get my projector alcove, and I decide to go bigger, I can always revert to front projection. Each square of the paper represents 3 inches. I rounded the screen height up to 48", didn't count the few inches of extra throw I'd get from the thickness of the wall the screen sits in front of, and fattened the end of the light path to 6", all so I'd err on the safe side with a bit of slack for error.

This folding exercise shows me I can make rear projection work using a mirror of about 30"x54", having the screen start at least 30" above the floor, and using a small box that intrudes into the theater room below the screen to hold the projector.

Another smaller mirror could put the projector fully back into the equipment closet, but that would making walking through the closet very awkward, and I don't mind the idea of the projector box under the screen that much anyway, although it could interview with center channel placement a little bit.

Most expensive projectors do have settings to flip the picture either horizontally or vertically or both, but that's something I would need to check on a case-by-case basis. It's not made obvious in the specs or most reviews.

Straight-on rear projection will produce an upright but mirrored image if not adjusted from front projection defaults.

[Edit: fixing an earlier mistake]

Bouncing off a mirror, which is useful for compressing a long projection path, will reverse that mirroring, so without making any adjustment to front projection defaults you'll end up with a properly oriented picture.

I like the light. It's pretty!

Seriously, as housing goes compared to income level, I'm well within a reasonable budget here, so I don't mind spending a little extra to get just what I want. And while this might be a weird architectural feature, as long as it's properly water-tight and structurally sound (I won't do it if it isn't), it shouldn't detract from the value of the house. Any potential future buyer can simply ignore the space, use it for storage, a build a wall safe if they have no use putting a projector in there.


That's why I'm letting the builder have the final say. If he's too wary about this, I'll drop it.

The projector alcove is dead... not unexpected.

Now that I've played around with the geometry a bit, it looks like I could still manage to do rear projection (if that turns out to be the way I want to go) with one under-$1000 first surface mirror, using a 6"-deep equipment closet, even for screen sizes up to 110" diagonal, although at the upper end of screen sizes there might have to be a projector enclosure box that protrudes into the theater room, under or over the screen.