How To Set Up A Home Theater For A Small Room

Introduction

In 2017, I set up my family’s first home theater projector in my extremely small 9ft x 9ft room. Having a dedicated home theater room of any scale is so fulfilling once you get the fundamentals right.

So how do you set up a home theater in a small room?

It is completely possible to set up a home theater in a small room. You need about 9ft in length to create a home theater with a projector, movie screen, and speaker system. You can purchase a high-quality short throw projector if you have an even smaller space without sacrificing image quality. There are plenty of design tips online that show you how to make it look better than an average entertainment room.

Table of Contents

Projectors for Small Rooms
Home Theater Screens For Small Rooms
Speaker Setup
Lighting and Design Ideas
Home Theater Receivers
Related Questions

Home Theater Projectors for Small Rooms

The projector in my opinion is the most important purchase you make. It is usually the most expensive item you purchase for your set up as well and there’s too much information online about buying the “perfect” one. I’ll break it down in the simplest of terms for you

Here’s two really important buying tips to keep in mind:

Short throw projectors for small rooms are just as good quality as a normal projector. You can purchase one that is actually even higher quality than most such as the VAVA 4k Short Throw
Get a projector with at least 2,000 lumens. Lumens are a measure of how bright the bulb is. If you don’t get a projector that’s bright enough (usually the $100 budget ones are lower than this), then it won’t be powerful enough to project a good image onto the screen. You want to be able to turn the projector brightness down rather than wish it could be brighter.

The projector I use for my small room: Epson 2040

My family bought this one a few years ago and we absolutely love it. We put our home theater in a small bedroom (my old one at the time) and this projector absolutely blew us away with how good it was. I never wanted to go back to viewing movies and playing video games on a TV again. And it’s super affordable for the quality that it gives!

My video review of it here:

Projector Set up Ninja Tip: install an AC vent near the projector to keep it completely silent. Small rooms make ventilation harder so the fan noise increases during the summer

This was something I didn’t consider when I purchased mine. Our room heated up quite a bit until we installed a working AC vent in the room during the summer.

Home Theater Screens

There’s too much information online about what the perfect screen is for a home theater. For a small room, it comes down to two things:

Give your screen enough buffer space between the walls. Make sure its at least a foot smaller than the wall dimensions from each direction. As you can see from the picture below (my family’s set up), we made sure to have enough space on the side and above and below the screen.

2. Make sure set up and disassembly is super easy and that the screen is lightweight. Screens that are too hard to set up are frustrating, and you’re going to want to play around with the orientation of it before you’re satisfied. You might even want to take it outside for an outdoor movie night. Having a heavy projector screen is super annoying to adjust and implement. It also wears down your wall from its weight.

The Screen I Use and Love: Elite Screens

This company does an amazing job with the quality and variety of screens they produce. My family purchased this one for a great price which is still the same now as it was in 2018. What we like so much about this screen is that its affordable, can mount to the wall without stands, and can be easily used for outdoor movies as well.

Even if you don’t plan to watch outside at all, the ease of set up is why you should get this one over other screen models. It’s great for beginners who are setting up their first home theater.

Projector Screen Ninja Tip: Buy projector screens that are made from a CineWhite Synthetic material. This is the same material actual movie theaters use.

What about grey colored screens? Grey color screens are perfectly fine too. In fact, they reduce ambient light just a little more than white. This is a good option to look into if you don’t have blackout curtains and deal with a lot of ambient light in your soon-to-be home theater room.

Home Theater Speakers

Speakers for your small room home theater are usually personal preference. There is some guidance I would offer from my experience and research that I think would help you a lot to make your setup even more functional than mine.

Buy long audio cords. You have to route your speaker cords to your projector or media device, which often will sit in the back of the room. For my set up, my family routed the cord around the side of the room in a conservative manner so it wasn’t a distraction. I drew a super artistic photo below to show you what our set up does. It’s a feasible solution if you have a wall mounted ceiling too. Professional consultants can give you better advice on this if you need it.
Try to get a subwoofer even if you only have front speakers. Subwoofers have an awesome effect on movies and video games when you’re in a small room. It makes sound effects even more enjoyable and you really feel like you’re getting the true movie theater experience.

Our Speakers: Bose CineMate GS Series II

We’ve used these speakers for years and they’re perfect for our small room. While it’s not not surround sound, it’s an affordable option until we decide to upgrade. Bose is one of our favorite speaker company (not sponsored by them at all) because it’s easy to use this system and adjust the base and treble volumes with ease. Some movies you’ll want to slightly adjust these settings so you can hear the audio better.

Home Theater Speakers Ninja Tip: Tie your speaker remote to a string and attach it to a dedicated spot on a nearby table. It’s easy to lose the remote in small room with cracks between furniture if it’s not put back in it’s spot.

Home Theater Lighting

There’s a couple different lighting options you can install in your room. Some of them require more installation than others and some are just for the design and overall look. I’ll give you a quick rundown on the different options people choose and you can decide which one is best for you. If you already know what lighting you will use, then feel free to skip this section.

LED Lights

This is a picture of my room with LED lights running all across the top of the room. We installed a thin, mini shelf so the strips aren’t peaking over the top and making it look visually unappealing. This cost us a couple hundred to install ourselves and then the light strips were purchased on amazon and came with their own remote.

Wall Sconces

Side wall light mounts are really cool and they make it look more like an actual movie theater room. These are the same ones you tend to see when you walk into a public theater and they dim and light up depending on when the show is about to start.

These are a great option if you’re really going for that authentic, home theater look.

Fiber Optic Lighting

I absolutely love this type of lighting. The star ceilings in home theater rooms are some of the coolest ways to light your room. For small set-ups, I would definitely recommend it because they’re so much more affordable than bigger spaces that you see online. There’s a lot of people that build this for DIY projects or you can higher professionals to do this.

Home Theater Lighting Ninja Tip: Make sure your LED light strip power box is positioned where it can receive signal from the remote. If it’s blocked by decor items, then it’ll be hard to use the remote for on/off switching.

Design Ideas

Here you can see good use of ceiling lighting, side wall lighting, and a great projector set up! This room is a little bit larger than our setup but the furniture layout is just what this room needs to feel spacious. Notice how there’s a little but of area behind the couches, as that could be used for a wet bar setup or popcorn machine.

The picture below is a good example of use of wall sconces. There’s a ton of different designs a home theater can have with these. Many of them are custom made by specific companies, as they are more for looks than they are for actual lighting utility.

Depending on your budget, you might want to consider getting dedicated furniture for your home theater. There’s a ton of home theater seating options from different companies. What I really like about the picture below is that the furniture slowly becomes more elevated as you walk to the back of the room. With a lot of small rooms, it can feel like there isn’t any space for people to sit in front of you.

The use of a beanbag chair below the actual seats makes it even easier for kids and multiple people to view. When I was looking at furnished houses in my area, I noticed the home theater rooms only had one row of furniture if the rooms were considerably small. It wasn’t until I stumbled across this image where I saw a room actually make it work for itself. For my future setup, I will definitely be getting some of these seats.

Additional Resources

10 Best Projectors With Built In Speakers (#10 is Our Favorite). This is a great article I wrote for people that want to simplify their home theater projector set up. It’s a quick read, and I did a lot of research to narrow it down better than Amazon ever will. I’ve also personally used a lot of the projectors from this article, as it took a couple tries for me to land on the one my family and I still use to this day.

Do Projector Screens Actually Matter? [Spoiler: Yes, they do]. The biggest reason I don’t recommend getting a super crappy projector screen! If you get a great projector but a screen that isn’t durable or holds up well, then you’re not going to have the best experience possible (and the biggest bang for the buck). This article has some great tips that’s also based on my personal experience using different projector screens. It also has the recommended screen review that I use in there.