litesout

Fair warning, this is a long post. I'm hoping it will help others that want to do the same though.

Since I bought my house back in April I've been wanting to run some network and speaker wiring. But, given the heat here in Florida I haven't been able to until this weekend. My buddy got to the house at about 3:00 Saturday afternoon. Figured it would take most of the evening, but didn't think it was going to be a late night. Boy were we wrong. Worked until about 4am, then back up at 10 to finish up. He didn't leave until 5 and I didn't finish until about 8.

There were challenges from the beginning. First off, the height and shape of the room.



As you can see, above the entertainment center there's a built in shelf that goes back about a foot. And its solid. The top is actually wood and, as I discovered later, all the walls have 2x4 headers and ply.

We started off by drilling from the top and fishing our pull string down to the opening for the cable jack. Then, from the attic, we were able to get a fish tape down through the wall to the top of the shelf and get the pull string into the attic. From there, the first pull was cake. We got 3 runs of cat5 and one of the speaker wires up there in the first bundle. It was a 2 part pull with me in the attic and my buddy on the shelf. He had to pull to there while I took up the slack into the attic.



When all was said and done, we do have one run of exposed cable. Its on top of the shelf and not visible. I'm going to seal the hole around the cables on the top and where it goes into the wall. Its not visible.

Now came the fun part, getting the cable to the back of the room. I have 14' vaulted ceilings over the main part of the house. At the peak, there's about 4' of crawl space above. Not bad, but still a challenge to get across. Finding the top of the back wall was a challenge too, but not the biggest one. Once we found the top of the wall, getting into it was pretty easy. But, given the height of the room, there's a horizontal wall header 8' from the bottom. Finding that wasn't easy.



We had to cut a hole in the wall about 10"x4" to get through the stud and pull the wire the rest of the way down. Once we got to the bottom, we pulled the second speaker from the bottom back over to front wall. We also pulled several feet of slack on 2 of the cat5 runs (remember, we pulled 3 from the front wall) and brought it over to the closet in the office. The challenge there is that as you get closer to the front and back of the house, the crawl space gets lower and lower. By time you get to the back wall of the office, its only about 2'.



We cut a small hole in the ceiling and dropped the slack from the 2 runs into the closet. Why? Because by dropping the slack from both runs allowed us to simply cut the cables in the closet, thus giving us 4 straight runs all terminating in the closet. 2 behind the entertainment center and 2 on the back wall of the living room. I'm going to install a switch behind the entertainment center so the second cable is a bit of overkill. But, I'll have a backup cable in case the first one goes bad. And the two cables runing down the back will go into the back wall and the wall of the master bedroom. I'm also going to put a 6 gang plate in the ceiling of the closet and do cat5 keystone jacks up there to eliminate the cables hanging from the ceiling. I'll have patch cables to run from the swtich up to the jacks. I'll update the thread when I do.

So, after running the slack loops into the office closet, I came back to the top of the back wall and grabbed the second speaker cable to bring it back to the front. I also grabbed another run of cat5 from the office to run into the kitchen. Unfortunately, there were some issues dropping the cable into the location I wanted so, its still up there. I'm going to attack that again in the coming days.

Now, remember back at the beginning where I brought 3 runs of cat5 up from behind the entertainment center, but only 2 of them were for network? Well, when I was getting supplies, I stumbled across some interesting audio jacks. Leviton Quickport RCA 110. They allow you to carry an unamplified audio signal over cat5. It uses 2 of the 4 pairs (4 wires of the 8 all togehter.) My sub is behind the couch, so I now have a jack for it in the back of the room.

So, nothing really left but some pics of the finished product! You've already seen the entertainment center. Well, part of it anyway.





Few pics of the switch in the closet.







Few pics of the wall plates on the back wall of the living room. The plates behind the entertainment center are the same with the exception of the 4 gang keystone plate. I got a keystone jack for the cable there so all 4 holes are filled.

There's a bit more work left, but its all functional and the house is put back together. The speaker wire is Monoprice 14awg CL2 in wall speaker wire, including the jumpers from the wall plates to the speakers and the receiver. I used about 150' total. The cat5 is a collection of cables that my buddy and I had laying arond not doing anything. One of them was probably 80' long, he brought a spool and I had another 50' cable that we used for the audio.

Please, please post any questions you may have. And I'll keep the thread updated as I continue working on the project and add to it. I'll also be running speaker wire to the back porch, but probably not for a while. I'm broke and will need another spool of wire.

Ron Burgundy

Nice work! What part of O-town you in?

litesout

Thanks! I'm in South Orlando, Southchase. Its 1 neighborhood north of Hunter's Creek.

fsttyms1

Very nice!

moeronn

Sounds like a lot of work, but well worth it. I plan on tackling a similar project in a few months.

litesout

It is a huge undertaking, but so worth it. Do you have vaulted ceilings or just the standard 8/10 footers? Have you mapped out your runs through the attic yet?

Personally, I wouldn't wait. Do it now while its cool. I don't know about you, but getting in the attic in jeans and a long sleve shirt during the summer months for any period of time is just not a possiblity.

thunder04

iTrader: (1)

Very nice! I'd love to do something similar, but the ceiling in my livingroom and office are both vaulted and there is zero attic space. My desire to not drill a bunch of holes in the ceiling trumps my desire to run ethernet and speaker wire. lol

Well, now that I think about it, there just might be a way to run Ethernet cabling from my office to my livingroom....but there is no easy way to wire my rear speakers (the run would be 90 degrees of the vaulted ceiling thus having to pass through a bunch of beams).

I'll have to investigate.

evilone

SRY to this thread but O-town has a SIIIICK new Go kart track.. karts do 60mph.. awesome course layout and every Sunday is a 2hrs endurance race for $50.. 20 min practice session, then 2hr race using their karts. my brother, nephew, and I went over turkey day.. it was OFF THE CHAIN.. I would be there every sunday if I lived closer.

moeronn

It's definitely at least a couple of months off before I tackle this. We're still moving in and have plenty of other organizing before the wiring. Thankfully, the summer months here aren't as unbearable as Orlando. Plus it might be spring when I do this.

We have standard 8' ceiling with decent attic space. And if that doesn't work, we also have a crawl space under the house if necessary. Also thinking about doing in-ceiling speakers for at least the rears. We'll see, but it will definitely be planned out... somewhat.

litesout

Definitely go up there and look. I too have vaulted ceilings above the living room and office. I was quite surprised to find that there's about a 4 ft crawl space above the peak. I've got no ceiling holes (except for the one in the office closet that the ethernet cables drop through) and just the one hole in the wall that I'm going to patch this weekend and paint on Monday. By Tuesday, nobody will ever know that the hole was there. And I'll have ethernet drops in 3 rooms.

Ron Burgundy

I grew up in Hunters Creek, since 93ish, and my parents still live there.

litesout

Okay, that timeline for patching the hole was a lot more ambitious than I thought. I just started last night. Put down the first coat of spackle last night. Going to sand it when I get home and put down another coat. After which its back to Home Depot to see about getting some spray on texture to match the wall. I've got another piece of drywall that I had to cut out behind the 4 gang keystone jack to take with me for comparison. I probably won't paint until this weekend though.

litesout

I looked at a lot of houses in Hunters Creek. Truth be known, that's where I really wanted to live, but this house was just too big a bargain to pass up. Bank owned FTMFW! I found one that I truly fell in love with, but the HOA dues pushed it just out of my price range. I pay yearly what they pay quarterly.

litesout

Well, the other day my sub started humming. It started out pretty low (no audio pun intended) and progressively got louder. Now its pretty noticable. Well, after isolating and checking each cable I narrowed it down to the run going through the attic. Please learn my from my mistakes and don't use Cat5 to run audio. Now I've got to order a long audio cable and go back into the attic in the summer heat.