My family room, the movie theatre

We aren't there yet. To build a real movie theatre, the room has to be designed from the ground up to handle the sound and seating and everything else to give you the best experience possible. This won't be that room. It will, however, be a really nice room to come home to and crash in after a long day at work. Not a huge TV, but good quality, and not super expensive audio, but also good quality. And a design for the room that allows regular use for all sorts of purposes without the audio or video being apparent or getting in the way of anything. This means the speakers and cables need to be on the walls or behind the walls. I'm getting very close indeed to realizing this dream.

First, some before shots:

Here you can see the fireplace and the TV alcove above it, as well as the speaker panels. Thankfully, the builder (or the previous owners, though I doubt it) installed these panels with connections for surround sound. This is very helpful. It means we don't need to string wires along the wall to get sound from one end of the room to the other.

This is one of the remaining issues. There's a coax cable in the alcove, but no center channel speaker connectors and no way to get a video signal (other than coax) into the TV. I've got a decent HDTV and coax isn't going to cut it. We need HDMI up in this bad boy. I don't, however, want cables running down the bottom corner of the alcove like drool out of a yokel's slack jaw. I want it to be nice and clean. Functional, invisible and easy.

This is the back wall. Notice the center channel connections on the left. Who does that? Why would you need center channel connections in the rear of the room? Especially considering that they had already run the coax cable and the front speaker channel wires from the rear to the front, this boggles my mind. Still, though, no video connector. You can put your receiver back here and plug into the inputs for the speakers, but you're on your own for the picture, I guess.

Not on my watch, pal! I'm moving the center channel output panel up into the alcove along with an HDMI wall panel. The other HDMI wall panel will take the place of the rear center channel panel here on the left so I can plug from my receiver into the wall and then from the wall into the TV and have an HD signal without running wires across my floor. Brilliant!

We got the rear panel mostly done but the camera was out of juice. I'll update tonight or tomorrow with more pics of what all we've done.