I have a cabling conundrum that I’d like some suggestions on.
My house has a finished basement, and a second floor. I want to run speaker wires and coax cable too if possible. My television / receiver etc. is on an outside wall*. I can’t easily go up the wall to an attic because there’s another floor there that I’d have to contend with. I can’t really go down to the basement because it’s finished with a sheet rock ceiling (IOW, not a drop ceiling that I could get to)
How is speaker wire generally run in situations like this? One thing I thought about was to remove the baseboard, cut and inch or two off the bottom of the sheet rock and hide the cables and wires there along the floor. Another option is to find the studs, cut out the sheet rock, drill a hole through each stud, and run the wires through there and patch / repaint the dry wall.
Both of those options seem like a lot of work; which isn’t necessarily bad; but how would a pro likely resolve this? Cable hiders? Go behind the wall? Find a way to go through the basement and back up again?
*To add on to the difficulty, I’m going to have a bookshelf / entertainment center built in to the wall.
Sorry, your description of what you want to do isn’t all that clear. On what floor is the TV/receiver located? Are you putting speakers in multiple rooms?
FTR, If you pull the baseboard off there’s probably already about a half inch or so gap down there so you won’t have to cut anything at all.
That’s what you’re trying to do, right? Punch a hole behind your TV, drop the speaker wires down to the floor behind the baseboards, run them to the left and right to the stud bay where the speakers are, then back up again…right? That should work just fine, I’ve done something similar.
ETA, I used a neodymium magnet and a few inches of chain on the end of a string to get something from the top hole to the baseboard since getting fish tape between the drywall and the insulation (without going through the vapor barrier) was proving to be a PITA. It was a bit of trouble, but it worked.
16 or even 14 or 12 gauge speaker wires aren’t all that thick. The first question is do you have carpet in any rooms? In houses I’ve lived in, I simply push the wires under the baseboard where the carpet meets the wall. If you have hardwood or tile, you can’t really do this, but you can remove the baseboard and tuck the wires behind the baseboard, as usually the drywall doesn’t go all the way to the floor. Cutting into the drywall and patching and painting is the hardest option.
Other options installers use are, as you thought of, to go up into the attic or down into the basement and then back down or up. Once you get into a stud channel, it’s usually fairly easy to go up and down, but you then have to drill through the bottom or top header. Cable TV installers are notorious for simply drilling through an outside wall, running the cable outside and then drilling back through another wall into the house.
I think all he’s trying to do is mount the speakers on the wall a few feet away (think front surround sound) without routing the wires into the attic or (finished) basement. The wires are going to go from the TV, to the speakers and he’s trying to figure out how to get them there. I think what I said earlier is going to be easiest.
Yeah, let me try to explain it better. Sorry about that.
One room only.
Television on an exterior wall.
This is on first floor of my house, so I can’t get to an attic. Basement is finished, so I can’t easily get to cables if I drill through the floor.
I would like to run speaker wire for a couple of speakers. Additionally my cable feed comes into my house in the corner of my of the exterior wall in question; but my TV is in the center of the same exterior wall. So there’s also a desire to take the cable that comes into the corner of the room and extend it the 10 or 20 feet to come out of the wall behind the television. Adding on to the cable and drilling a new hole from the exterior of the house is not an option.
Popping the baseboard off and running the wires around the room at the bottom edge of the sheetrock is probably the best option to hide the wires.
For the TV cable, you should be able to push/drop an extension from the existing location down to the floor level, run laterally to get behind the TV, then either leave the cable “loose” or poke a hole in the wall behind the baseboard and run the cable up to a new wallplate. You can probably wiggle the existing wallplate into the wall, connect the extension to it, then cover the hole with a blank plate.
There are on-wall flat speaker wires that go on like tape, then can be painted to become nearly invisible. The stuff is brutally expensive compared to normal wire, and there’s no equivalent for twisted-pair or coax.
If you’re just running a phone line or Cat5 cable, it’s usually easy to sneak it around the edge of a carpeted floor. Occasionally, I’ve had to pull up the edge of the carpet and put wires “inside” the tackstrip, then put the carpet back down, but usually, there’s enough wiggle room where the carpet meets the wall to hide a cable.
I’ve done this and painted the cable channel the same color as the wall. Blends in pretty well. But painting might be just as much work as pulling the baseboard.