So I’ve been calling around getting estimates to have my home theater system professionally wired. Basically I have a 6 month old girl who’s going to be crawling and pulling on things soon and I want the rear speakers mounted on the wall and the wires run through the wall and/or under the carpet.
I’m kind of getting sticker shock from the estimates so far. They’ve been in the $400 - $500 range, including wires, mounts, and labor. Anyone else out there had this done and paid this much or more? Any tips on shaving that price down, like buying the wire and mounts myself and just paying for the labor?
Note: I am about the most un-handy person I know. Punching holes in drywall and ripping up carpet is best left to people who know what they’re doing. In my case, so “just do it yourself, it’s easy” isn’t an option.
$500 is cheap, actually, particularly if the cabling is included.
What you might consider as an alternative is cable guides, that hide the wiiring. You can run them along the baseboards or the ceiling corners, and white or beige ones will be relatively unobtrusive.
Cable guides are also known as surface raceway, wire raceway, or wire channel. For something so simple, retailers charge quite a bit for it, upwards of $1.25 per foot. But, it is something you can install yourself
My wife and I just ran the wires along the walls close to the ceiling, and used nails underneath to hold them in place. It looks kind of ugly, but luckily some of the speaker cable was already white, and we used that in the most obtrusive places.
I hate stuff that’s wired through the walls, because if you ever need to cange it (say, add a new speaker), you’ve got real problems.
$400 to $500 to have someone guide it through the wall and / or under your carpet is not too unreasonable, however wiring it yourself really is not all that difficult.
One trick is to set your mounts for the rear/sides on the wall drill a hole in behind the mounts and again down at the floor entrance, string the wires along the base and put up some floor boarding to cover it the distance back. The guiding through the wall then is quite minimal (a couple of feet) and you just feed it from the top to the bottom with a string attached and something to reach in to the hole and grab it and thread it through.
You can also peel your carpet back down the center and run it along there straight to the back and against put some holes in the wall and wire it up to the mounts that way. Though if you are doing the carpet route the advise from most people is to get the flat cables, which will increase your costs.
