Excellent effort on the room! I also DIY'ed my HT. Same thing, mostly stuff from Home Depot. took 8 months. I did have the dropped ceiling profess. installed, since it's only a 3" drop and they had to literally insert the tiles as they built it.
If you have the space, you should check into a stereo pair of subs. It IS a huge improvement over a single sub, especially for two chanel listening, which I also use the room for mostly.
Just a thought. If you haven't done a dimmer on your lighting, it would be excelent upgrade. But you cannot use flourescents with one - they may interfere sonically with your system. It's actually recommended to have some dim light in the room while using visuals, so that there is less "shock" to the eye when transitioning from dark scenes to bright ones. It also makes it possible to move about without too much difficulty.
If you have several circuits of lighting, you could check out the Lutron Spacer system - remote control lighting with several "scenes" or presets for whole lighting system in the room. Way cool. Just a thought.
You may enjoy a subscription to "Home Theater Builder Magazine" if you've not heard of it before. Very informative and interesting to see what others have done.
Blessings,
Doug
