Its no secret Nikki and I have been working on finishing our basement for along time now, probably for about 1 year now. Today marks the first day that we started moving stuff from upstairs into its permanent home in the basement. This is a great feeling to finally be using the rooms we worked so hard to finish.

We bought a couple of desks at Ikea and spent some time today assembling them. Once they were ready we moved the computers from our makeshift office in the 2nd bedroom upstairs down to the real office in the basement. Its great!. The room is well air conditioned, has numerous electrical outlets, and network connections everywhere we need them. This is in stark contrast to our office upstairs where we both shared a crappy fold out desk, ran off of a single wall outlet and network jack, and were in a room that was always hot.

Thats not all we moved down stairs though. I hung a piece of drywall on the wall to act as my screen. I primed it twice and started applying Goo Systems screen paint. I am not done yet but it already looks great. I mounted the projector and hauled all my stereo equipment and speakers down stairs. I got it all hooked up and promptly spent one hour stairing in awe at the amazing setup. The speakers are perfectly placed and recessed into the walls, the wall color is dark and non-reflective, the screen is incredible, and the lighting creates an amazing mood. I cant believe its the same equipment I had upstairs as well. Upstairs it sounded pretty good. Downstairs you forget you are watching a movie and start to think you are really there. The sound and picture is all immersive. For the first time in all my dorm rooms / apartments / houses I think I finally nailed the audio room setup and let me tell you it makes a big difference.

One more thing and then I will shut up, I finally have an optical audio and component video permantly run from my computer to the home theater. This makes it very easy to play games or HD movies from my computer on the home theater, which has far better audio and video equipment then my computer. This is a huge deal for me. One that I have already taken advantage of by watching a little BBC planet earth in HD.

Well I have spent enough time blogging when I should be playing with my new setup. Stay tuned for some pictures of the finished basement.