Hiding TV and Speaker Wire

My latest project is normally my first post-move project, but I started this one late because I wanted to do it just right. Normally when I move to a place, I setup the TV and stereo first. Forget unpacking clothes, forget unpacking pots and pans (besides microwave stuff), and you can even forget unpacking the computer. I wanted to have that TV and stereo setup so it made the rest of the unpacking easier to stand. In the past, I was always moving into an apartment or condo, and I could never actually hide wires properly (running them into the basement or ceiling). So, I knew it was a quick setup. I knew this one would be a bit more complicated.

This picture (which Jen doesn't want me to post because she thinks it looks like we don't clean up after ourselves, but which I think is a good "before" picture) shows how the room looked after I mounted the TV on the wall. Notice the cable coming from the old TV nook, the modem in the lower left corner with phone and internet wires running to the TV stand, and the speaker wire near the fireplace running to the surround sound speakers. It not only looked bad, but it also wasn't too safe. After all, Jen and I are both pretty clumsy. Here's how it looked when facing the TV. It doesn't look too badly for an apartment setup, and could be improved with a few of those plastic cable tubes that also run down the wall, but that wouldn't require me to buy a lot of tools.
Last Saturday, I sat down with a pen and paper, staring at this mess. I came up with a plan and a shopping list. The plan was to cut one hole in the wall for each of the speakers, one behind the TV and one behind the entertainment center to run the HDMI cable, another behind the TV for power (it's against pretty much every code to run a power cord thru the wall, meaning insurance won't cover you if you burn down your house because of it), and another behind the entertainment center for the cable, phone, and internet connections (for the potential future project of wiring the house for internet). In order to aid future wiring projects, the plan was to put conduit into the walls between each of the holes. I wanted each of the holes to be clean, so I wanted to make sure each was covered by a nice wall plate. I had also planned to run the TV outlet off of the existing outlet behind the entertainment center.

So, off I went to the hardware stores with this shopping list, armed with gift cards from Lowes and Home Depot:
1. A punch saw.
2. 5 wall plates and connections for the speakers.
3. 1 wall plate for the new outlet.
4. 1 new outlet.
5. 1 outlet box.
6. Conduit and wires.
7. 7 boxes for the speaker and TV wires.
8. 1 box and wall plate for the cable, phone, and internet wires.
9. Snaking wire.
10. Wire cutters.
11. Conduit.
12. 100' of speaker wire.
13. 25' of cable.
14. 25' of phone wire.
15. Wire staples.
16. Cable endings and barrels.

I went to Lowes first because we had a gift card from our wedding that we found when we unpacked (there wasn't a Lowes in the city, but there's one within about 5 miles of us). I wasn't sure if the gift card would work, but it did. While there, I learned that there are basically two types of boxes that you can buy. There are ones for "new work" and ones for "old work". The former are to be used when you don't have drywall up, so I needed the "old work" ones. I also learned that they have some for things like outlets and switches and some for things like phone and internet wire. The latter are considered "low voltage". In this picture, you can see the low voltage ones that are going behind the entertainment center. The one on the right is the one of which I needed 7. You may also notice that the one on the right doesn't go very far into the wall. That's because it's the "old work" type that doesn't have to be nailed to wall stud (it's hard to fit a hammer into the wall to do so), rather it anchors itself to the wall. I bought a lot of stuff at Lowes using the one gift card, then went to Home Depot to buy the speaker and phone wire, the speaker connections, and the flexible drill bit. There, I realized that the speaker connections I wanted didn't require the face plates I bought at Lowes, so I have something to return there. I hate to admit it, but I was shopping for about 2 hours. A lot of my time was spent trying to figure out which types of outlet boxes I needed, and also how to secure the conduit.

I didn't get started on the project until Sunday.

My first task was to hook up the phone line. We have a phone outlet on a half-wall to our right when we face the TV. I took the panel off the wall to try to figure out how the wire was making its way there (I couldn't see it from the basement). I still don't know how it's getting there, but I decided to just drill through to the basement. It also meant I got to try out the flexible drill bit, which meant it was power tool time. I was a bit nervous to use it, but it's pretty cool. It's 50" long and is just flexible enough to allow one to put it into a hole in the wall then bend it down to cut through the 2x4 at the base of the wall and the subfloor. It worked like a charm for that hole that's 10" off the ground, but I would eventually have problems with other holes. After the drilling was done, I stripped the phone wire, connected the 4 wires to the existing outlet, fed the snaking wire up from the basement, hooded the phone wire to it, then pulled the slack down into the basement. With the wire in the basement, it was time to staple the wires to the floor joists so it wouldn't hang down (hindering the future man cave). I ran it over to the area below the TV.

Next, I used the punch saw to cut the hole that you see on the left side of the above picture. I also used the flexible drill bit again. I fed some conduit up into the hole. You can see it in this picture (the middle hole with the white (phone) wire). I then fed the snaking wire down from above and pulled the phone wire up and hooked it up to the outlet, which I left dangling because I still had to hook up the satellite cable. That was next. I already had a signal running into the basement, so I just had to put an ending and barrel on it. Then, I connected the new cable to it and stapled it to the ceiling (ala the phone wire, but don't kink cable!). I ran it up into the conduit already containing the phone line and hooked it up to the outlet. One hole was complete (the internet project is one for another year).

The next step was to wire up the outlet. I knew this was going to be the tough (and dangerous) part. First I turned off the circuit for the existing outlet. I used the surge suppressor (you can see it sitting on the entertainment center in the first and second pictures) to confirm that I had turned off the correct circuit (green light = circuit has power, no light = safe to work). It's a good thing I did so, because it was on a combined circuit for the family and laundry room, not the one labeled family room. That was nice because I could work with the light on. I cut the hole in a spot that would be covered by the TV, connected the conduit to side of it (tip: don't put it on the back if you have a room on the other side of the wall), unhooked the face plate and lower outlet, and punched a hole for the new conduit. At this point, I wasn't sure how I was going to get the conduit to hook up. I ended up using the snaking wire, feeding it from the existing outlet up to the new one. Then I ran the conduit down onto the snaking wire so its end would end up just outside the new hole in the existing outlet box. I'm sure there's a proper tool for this, but I used an angled allen wrench that I fed up into the conduit (next to the snaking wire) to pull it into place. This took a lot of finagling and swearing to pull off but eventually it snapped into place. With the conduit in place, I ran the black and white wires from the new box down to the existing one. I hooked up black to black and white to white. Then, I connected the new outlet to the wires, hooked up my test surge suppressor, and turned on the circuit to make sure it worked. It did. I turned the circuit back off, anchored the box to the wall, screwed the outlet into the box, and put on the face plate. From here on out, everything would be low voltage.

I cut holes out from behind each of the existing speakers, from behind the TV, and from behind the entertainment center. With one hole, I came pretty close to cutting the drain pipe for the clothes washer, and another was close to conduit for some other wiring. Luckily Libertyville requires that all electrical flow through conduit, so it would have been practically impossible to cut through it with a punch saw. If you're trying this yourself, you might want to cut power before cutting holes or drilling.

I then anchored the low voltage boxes to the wall and drilled the necessary holes (you can see them in the 4th picture). These were a bit more difficult because the flexible bit wasn't long enough to drill from above, but I was able to drill from below. The hard part was finding the snaking wire (that I was feeding in from below) among the insulation. With a little patience, I was eventually able to get them all wired through. Then I used the wire strippers to connect the speaker wire to their face plates. Here's the end result of that. It looks a lot better than the wire running down the wall. In this picture, you can also see the new power outlet and my "test" device. With the speakers on the wall and the TV back on the wall, I just had to hook up the components, clean up some drywall and wire endings, and rearrange the furniture.

Here's the final result. My next project is to paint so the contractor can come in to install our new kitchen appliances. I was going to try closing in the old TV hole, but the contractor said I'd only be saving myself a couple hundred bucks. I'd rather use that money to buy time to paint.