Building my cave

Hey guys,

Great site. I was wondering if you could give me some must have's for my man cave. We are building a house and my fiance has agreed to let me do my own setup in the walkout basement. My first order of business is going to be the tvs. I love watching sports, multiple sports at once. Thus, I am going to mount our 42 inch plasma on the wall and flank it on each side with a 32 inch LCD. Each TV will have its own digital tuner and the 42 inch will also have a dvr. Have you guys ever seen caves with multiple tvs or ideas on how it will work?

Thanks

NebrasKAT1 glad to have you aboard!

One of our latest Man Caves displayed in the "Cave Gallery" has 9 TV's!

Once you get the boob tubes set up, don't forget to have enough comfortable seating for all the cave dwellers. Besides that, the skys the limit. Make the cave your own and surrond yourself with what you like (besides your fiance)!

Have fun with it and bring family and friends over to enjoy. That's what its all about, having a good time!!

Cave On!

Mike

What theme are you planning on using? A sports room, bar/pub theme, staight up home theater look, etc?

You have already decided to run each TV on it's own tuner which means your on a dish correct? I hope you are anyway, HD BABY... If so, you're a step ahead of the game. Folks often struggle with how to use spliters for basic cable but there are loads of links on the net for that.

Suggestion: If you have a Laptop/PC and internet accessablity in your Man Cave, you could get a KVM swith and run it to one of wall mounts so you can surf the net on your laptop or PC as well as one of you three screens, keeping up with various sports tickers etc. I have wirelss in my house so I run my lap top and two additional computer screens through a KVM Switch as well as a USB Multi-Display Adapter so I can run www.nascar.com Track Pass, Scanner and Pit command while watching the race. Or I work on post processing photography work while I watch "The Red Green Show".

Must haves?

Those vary as Mike said, it all surrounds what you want out of it. He already touched on comfortable seating and really, it mostly depends on you.

1. A good sound system, period. If you are going to have multiple monitors, for the love of all that is manly please don't depend on their own built in sound. You may already have one and not sure what your budget is if you don't research around a bit before buying; Bose is good, but for a few more bucks you can get something that'll blow your hair dry.

2. Do you drink beer/alcohol? Yes/No

If the answer is yes: Buy a Kegerator or make one from an unused stand up fridge by using a kit. Just remember, if you make one on your own... you have to incorporate a tasteful use of Duct Tape in some fashion.

If the answer is No: Get your hands on a mid size or compact fridge to hold misc beverages.

3. A Bar: unless of course the answer to number 2 is no. But a bar is almost a mandatory addition to any man cave whether it be an open bar or a service bar with stools.

4. Not so much of a must have suggestion than a "must do" suggestion. Remember a room has 6 sides; 4 walls, a ceiling and a floor so when you engineer the design (men do not decorate) and look of your Man Cave, keep that in mind. Make sure you engineer your room to pimp slap all 5 senses and create the never ending search for the 6th.

Thanks for the suggestions Earnhardt. I am going to use several of them.

I don't drink, but the fiance does so we will be installing a bar later. However, I will get the refrigerator for beverages until we get the bar installed.

I already have a pretty sweet sound system.

You recommended using dish. Right now I am on cable, but when we move into the new house I was thinking of switching. Do you ever have a poor signal due to weather?

The only time I have really noticed weather messing up thew sat signal is during lightning storms..... when we do get heavy rain and wind doesn't seem to mess with it much. I am pretty happy with the Dish Network but I do use local cable company for the high speed internet service.

The only caveat to that is that I live in Arizona so our weather is pretty nice year round for the most part.