You bought the Carl’s Place kit. Now the room must earn it.

IntegrateIT installs Carl’s Place golf simulator kits across Kansas City, Missouri and the Johnson County suburbs — Carl’s Place is on our authorized brand list, and Carl’s Place enclosures are what our own simulator builds use as standard. We are a CEDIA member and Platinum-tier Control4 dealer headquartered in Overland Park, KS, founded in 2021 by Daniel and Moran Alon. Finishing a kit you already bought is ordinary work here: measure the room against it, anchor and square the frame, tension the screen, hang the netting, lay the turf flush, align the projector out of the ball path, control the light, and run the power and network the kit assumes you already have. Call (913) 804-7575 or email office@integrateit.tech.

What is in the box, and what the box assumes

Configurations differ, so read your own packing list rather than ours. Broadly, a simulator kit gives you the enclosure hardware, the impact screen, and usually netting or padding, with turf, hitting mats and projector mounts available alongside. All of that is good equipment and none of it is the hard part.

What no kit contains is the room. It quietly assumes you have ceiling height for a full driver swing, structure worth anchoring to, a level floor, control over the light that lands on the screen, power where the projector and the simulator PC need it, a wired network path, and a projector sitting at the correct throw distance for your screen width. Every genuinely painful call we take about a self-installed simulator is somewhere in that list, not in the carton.

Measure before you unbox — five numbers

• Ceiling. Nine feet is a workable minimum, ten is the target, and it is your swing rather than your height that sets it. Take a full driver swing and have someone measure the highest point the clubhead reaches, then add a buffer above it.
• Width. Twelve feet is a hard minimum, 14–15 feet is comfortable. Width is what lets the hitting area be centered so the bay serves right- and left-handed players, and leaves somewhere for a second person to stand that is not inside the swing.
• Depth. Sixteen feet is workable, 17–20 feet is comfortable, and how you spend it depends on whether your launch monitor reads at impact or needs room to watch the ball fly.
• Clearance behind the screen. One to two feet, so the screen can flex and absorb the shot rather than return it.
• Obstructions in the swing path. Ductwork, beams, sprinkler drops, recessed cans, and in a garage the door tracks, the opener, hanging lights and storage racks. A ten-foot ceiling with an opener in the arc is not a ten-foot ceiling.

If those five numbers work, the kit will work. If they do not, no amount of careful assembly rescues it — which is why the survey comes before the screwdriver. The full reasoning behind each number is in golf simulator room requirements.

Square, anchored, and not against the wall

A simulator frame that is out of square produces two problems at once, and only one of them is obvious. The visible one is the image: a screen that is not a true rectangle cannot hold a rectangular picture, and the projector cannot fix it — correcting geometry in software to compensate for a crooked frame is how people end up with a soft, cropped picture and no idea why. The invisible one is tension: an out-of-square frame loads the screen unevenly, which changes how it takes a ball across its surface.

Anchor where the room allows it. A frame fixed into joists and studs is stiffer, quieter and safer than a free-standing one, and it stops the slow creep that comes from months of ball strikes. And leave the back wall alone: pushing the enclosure hard against it takes away the 1–2 feet the screen needs to flex, which turns every solid strike into a rebound. That single detail is the most common cause of the complaint that a screen “throws the ball back at you”.

Tension is a craft, not a setting

The screen is doing two jobs that argue with each other — stopping a golf ball at real speed, and being the surface your course is projected onto. Pulled too tight it rejects the ball and loads the frame; left slack it ripples, and a ripple in an impact screen is visible in every straight line the software draws.

The number that matters more than overall tightness is evenness. Consistent tension at every attachment point is what makes a screen behave the same across its whole face, and one over-tensioned corner is exactly the kind of thing that produces a screen that looks fine and plays wrong. Then padding and protection on the frame edges, side netting with genuine overlap, and a ceiling baffle — because everyone misses, including good players, and the enclosure exists for the heel and the shank rather than for the good swing.

Everything else in the room that can be hit

Once the enclosure is up, we walk the ball path again — including the shanked one — and look at what is exposed. Light fixtures and pendants beside the screen wall. Sprinkler heads. A window. A wall-mounted TV or thermostat. A drywall corner with nothing in front of it. In a garage, the door panels and the opener. These are cheap to protect during the build and expensive to discover afterwards, and they are the reason we netting-and-baffle more generously than most kit instructions suggest.

Turf, strip and the floor underneath

A commercial-grade hitting mat absorbs shock better than a budget one and gives the club a more natural feel through impact — the difference shows up in wrists and elbows over a winter of daily practice. Set it flush with the surrounding turf so your stance is level: a strip standing proud of the turf changes your setup, then your strike, and then gets blamed on the launch monitor.

Under all of it, a level, well-built floor is the quiet foundation the room relies on. In a basement this is usually fine. In a garage it is a real piece of work, because garage slabs are pitched for drainage by design — the trade-offs, including the ceiling height a levelling subfloor costs you, are in our garage conversion guide.

The projector, mounted once and mounted right

A ceiling-mounted short-throw projector is the clean answer in almost every kit build: it keeps hardware out of the swing path and off the floor, and it sits above and behind the golfer so the swing never shadows the screen. The throw distance is calculated from your screen width rather than eyeballed, so the image fills the screen instead of spilling onto the surround, and the class we specify is 4K short-throw laser at 5,000+ lumens because an impact screen is a matte, roughly neutral-gain surface with no ambient-light rejection.

Alignment is mechanical: square to the screen, level, on the screen’s center line, adjusted with lens shift, with keystone correction left at zero. A matte dark surround around the screen finishes the job by absorbing the spill. If your image is already gray and slightly crooked, the diagnosis and repair sequence is in why your simulator projector looks washed out and off-center.

Power, network, light and control — the invisible half

Give the room lighting on its own dimmable circuit so a scene can drop it for play, and feed the projector, PC and monitor properly rather than daisy-chaining them onto the one outlet that was already there. Give the simulator PC a wired network drop — course downloads, updates and online rounds are exactly the traffic that suffers on a busy house network — and somewhere ventilated to sit outside the hitting zone. Then put lights, projector, PC and audio on a single scene, on Control4, Crestron or Lutron depending on what the house runs, so the room opens with one button instead of five.

And plan for climate. Basements and garages in this metro swing hot, cold and humid across the year, and temperature and moisture extremes are unkind to launch monitors, projectors and computers. It belongs in the design rather than in a February phone call.

Cost, and who warrants what

We quote after a site walk, because the room is the variable. What moves the number: ceiling height and room prep, electrical and network work, and whether you have already supplied the enclosure — a build where you have is priced below an equivalent complete build, for the obvious reason. What goes into the number is on the Kansas City golf simulator cost guide; we give a fixed price after a no-cost site walk, not a range by email.

Your kit keeps its own manufacturer warranty from Carl’s Place. Our work carries a 5-year workmanship warranty. If the survey finds that the room genuinely will not take the kit you bought, we will tell you that first, in plain language, and help you work out whether a different room in the house is the answer.

— Daniel Alon, founder, IntegrateIT. CEDIA member, Platinum-tier Control4 dealer. 15108 Glenwood Ave, Overland Park, KS. September 2026.