All we need now is some popcorn

The projector is mounted to the ceiling and all the components are connected.  We watched Pirates of the Caribbean – Curse of the Black Pearl.  It looked fantastic, especially considering it is being projected on the wall and not a screen.

I was anxious to give it a trial run last night, so everything is running as it was set from the manufacturer.  The picture looked great, but the surround sound needs some tuning.  This weekend I’ll tweak the settings a bit.

I was a bit peeved that the Panasonic BluRay player didn’t come with an hdmi cable.  I mean really, 330 bucks for the player and you include composite cables?  It would have cost them less than a few dollars to include the cable.  I would have been happy to pay 333 bucks for the unit with the cable, because I wouldn’t have had to run to the store and spend $30 for one.  Anyway…

I was pretty nervous about mounting the projector, but it all went smoothly.   I bought a Sanus ceiling mount for $89 from ProjectorPeople.  It was relatively straightforward to connect.  It took about 30 minutes to figure out the best way to align the adjustable brackets to the projector, mostly because the mounts on the projector are not symmetrically spaced, which didn’t make any sense to me.  Bolting the mount to the ceiling took less than 5 minutes and about another 30 minutes of adjustment to ensure projector was level and perpendicular to the screen.

So far I’ve spent 5 to 6 hours installing everything.  Seems like not paying the home theater guys $1200 to do the install was a good decision.

Basement Reno is Nearly Done

The long running renovation of our basement is nearly done.  We have been working on this project for over a year and passed all our final inspections on Nov. 6, 2008.  I did most of the work myself and my wife and I served as general contractor for the few projects we sub contracted out.

Carpet comes next week and it should really look finished!  Meanwhile, we are now shopping for all the fun stuff.

I learned a lot of new things on this project.  Overall I’ve found that with time and patience and lots of research you can figure out how to do just about anything.  However, finding decent information is sometimes tough.  So I figured I’d capture some of this information for all the DIY’ers out there that might be looking for some resources while finishing their basement.  As I move forward, I’ll add some pictures to illustrate the progress.