Planning to make my first home theater

check your throw ratio for your projector vs the screen size you want. Your room, while it will make it immersive (wider than deep), the throw ratio can make your screen smaller than you want. Also, your image has "no scale" we can understand. A few quick dimensions will help.
 

That flooring is sort of shit shit if you ever plan to vacuum it. It bows up into the vacuum and the brush bar will destroy it. Even if I turn off the brush bar, it just gets stuck to the vacuum. If I raise the vacuum up then it doesn't suck the dirt off the floor. I am using this stuff under my Bowflex right now, it isn't very resilient to people turning their sneakers on it.
 
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Apologies for the delays everyone, work and a friend's death have consumed all my time recently.

Trepidati0n, sorry for not including dimensions. The original plan did, but I can appreciate wanting some numbers for the new space. I've included an updated floor plan layout as well as the original existing conditions below.




ocellaris, thanks for the tip about the flooring. Unfortunately, it was bought a few months back when there was a sale on them, so I'm stuck with it. We have some of them out in the garage, and I didn't experience too much trouble with cleaning them, but I just swept the bulk of it off and cleaned it from the concrete where the tiles stopped. Maybe I'll implement a shoes off policy at the bottom of the stairs...

I'm still stuck with what to do about the oil tank. One of those temporary folding walls would do the job, but I'm concerned it may be terrible for acoustics. Not that I'm really doing much to help that anyway, but I'm certainly still looking for ideas.
 
A helpful tool for planning for projectors is to find out their optimum throw range. There are handy calculators out there that can assist, such as this
 
With a 12 foot room, figure you get a max of 10' feet between lens and screen. That will limit you to about 110" 16:9 screen or a screen that is 8' wide. This should be fine. 2.35:1 (Scope) movies might look a "little small", but honestly, if this is your first PJ, you will STILL be blown away by miles.
 
I would think the oil tank would act as a massive damper if it was full, and an annoyance if it was empty and the bass is doing weird things with it. I would try to start with just putting something on the sides of it. I have clean matching storage totes around my oil tank, however it is much further away than your.
 
I think I'm going to wall it off. I've been playing with an idea to have the wall on the short side act as the 'door', with it sitting on a bottom 2x and an upper track for it to slide along. Some simple mechanical stops will keep it from coming all the way out while also riding along the 'track'. The large wall would mostly be stuck in place, again using mechanical locking to keep it put, all while allowing removal without destroying the wall in case any serious work needs to be done with the oil tank. Only the small bottom track piece and the stops that are attached to the floor would be lost with an oil tank replacement. Figure I'll do these and the walls against the concrete with 2x3s, save a few bucks and a few inches.

Now I need to spend some time to see if double drywall and green glue will actually provide tangible benefit. The extra drywall alone will run me another $200 or so, on top of the few bucks to make it all 5/8" instead of 1/2". I haven't even priced the green glue yet. The ceiling will be plain tiles, either spray painted flat black or with a cheap black fabric wrapped and stapled to them.

*edit* Just want to thank you NoOther, I had actually already found that projector calculator and have played around with it quite a bit. Coupled it with some time reading the projector manual. Trepidati0n, I agree with your assessment on screen size. Given that I have to frame out a box to allow the basement window to swing open, 10' would be a bit of a stretch. The calculator shows I could get 120" at full 1.3x zoom at a throw of 10', but that leaves me no room for error. I'm planning on 100", I may spring for 110" at the end if things work out. Thanks again to everyone for your comments, I really appreciate it.
 
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