How To Transform Your Family Room Into A Home Theater

Transforming your family room into a home theater doesn't have to cost a lot of money. Besides buying theater seats, most of the tweaks you need to make are actually just minor improvements that go a long way towards enhancing the ambiance, visual appeal, and acoustical quality of the room. Here are some tips on how to convert your family room—or any room—into a great place to watch movies:

• Arrange your home theater furniture properly. When you want the best view of the screen at your local cinema, you sit in the middle of the row. The same principle applies at home. A head-on view will always be better than one from an angle, so try to arrange your theater seats accordingly.
• Dim the lighting. To enjoy the crystal-clear quality of your HD TV and Blu-Ray player, dim or turn off the lights while the movie is playing. Keep your home theater furniture away from windows if possible, and add heavy curtains or shades to block out light during daytime screenings.
• Wall-mount your speakers. Carpeting may absorb sound from your external speakers, thereby reducing the audio quality before it travels back to your theater seats. Instead, try wall-mounting your speakers or putting them on a shelf so they sit a couple of feet above head level.
• Cover all wiring. Why go to the trouble of buying nice home theater furniture and mounting your speakers on the wall if you're just going to leave all the wires and cables from your electronic equipment exposed in an unsightly mess? To improve the area's visual appeal, spend a few bucks on a wire channel and get those cables organized.
• Add floor lights. Some theater seats come with LED lights along the bottom to help you see in the dimmed room. If your chairs don't have this feature, you can add floor lights to achieve a similar effect. Just buy a string of rope lights from a home center and use the included clips to secure them to the baseboards or walkways of the room.

Putting home theater furniture in your family room does not mean you now have a state-of-the-art media room. You still need to make a few more adjustments to get the ambience, visual appeal, and acoustics just right. The above tips can help get you started, so give them a try!