[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

Retro-Wiring for your Home Theater
Part 4: Running Wire From Baseboards up to Wall-Mounted Speakers

Another common retro-wiring challenge is getting speaker wires in the wall to wall-mounted speakers, from inside the room. This is often the case if you have carpeted floors. Carpet is great all around for home theaters. It helps with acoustics, and it’s easy to hide wiring around the baseboard by stuffing it down “below grade,” as it were. So, with a carpeted room it’s often easy to get wire to the rear speakers without using the attic.

Naturally, carpet makes it easy to hide the wires for the front speakers as well, even if you do run your rear-speaker wiring through the attic. In our previous house, I not only hid the wires to the front speakers, I also cut a small hole in the carpet directly behind the speakers, which were a foot or so out from the wall, and routed the wire up through the hole from underneath. I then taped the wire to the back of the speaker, all the way up to the terminals, using black electrical tape. Approaching the speaker from the side, it looked like it was freestanding with no wire at all! Naturally, this visual trick will work best with zip-cord-type or flat speaker wire.

There are a couple variations on this in-wall technique, which is itself a variation of the “Bringing the wire straight out of the wall to the speakers” description in the second post of Part 1 – you might want to review that section. The simplest method is to have the speaker wire enter the wall right above the baseboard. This does leave a small length of wire visible between the carpet and top of the baseboard. If you’re using CL-2 or –3 wire, which you probably should be (since it’s going inside the wall), you can get it with a white jacket so the wire will hardly be noticed (assuming your baseboards are white ). If you want a completely clean installation with no wire showing, an alternative method is to drill into the baseboard “below grade” i.e., below the top of the carpet, and enter the wall at that point. However, this is more difficult as it will require some sheetrock repair, as outlined in Part 2, Dealing with a Cross Brace in the Wall.

Here are the tools and supplies we’ll be needing. Most of these are pictured in Part 1. The (*) indicates equipment and supplies needed if you want to get the wire into the wall at the bottom of the baseboard; if you’re going in above the baseboard you won’t need those items.

Tools

• Electronic stud finder.
• Electric drill.* As before, I recommend a heavy-duty model with a side-handle.
• 3/4” auger bit.
• Cordless drill.
• Assorted drill bits.
• Side cutters.
• Wire strippers like the ones pictured here, but there are a variety of similar tools available.
  Wirestrippers.jpg
  
  
• A pull sting that is a few feet longer than the distance between the baseboard and speaker location up on the wall.
• A short 1-ft. length of light-duty chain, for the pull string, as described and pictured in Part 1.
• Drywall (aka sheetrock) saw.*
• A narrow putty knife.*
• A pencil.*
• Telescoping magnet “antenna.”
• A long drill bit, 12: or longer, that’s a larger diameter than your speaker wire.*
• Needle nose pliers.*

Supplies

• Electrical tape.
• Drywall joint compound.*
• A few toothpicks.* The round variety will work best. These will simply be used for shims, so if you want to use something else, feel free!
• A small, thin piece of wood.*
• A few sheet rock screws.*
• A wet rag.*
• Matching wall paint and assorted painting supplies.*

The easy method

The first step, obviously, is to run the wires from the equipment location around the baseboard to the speaker locations, leaving enough length to get up the wall to the speakers, with an extra foot or two of slack. Use your stud finder to make sure there are no internal braces in the wall between the proposed speaker location and the floor. (As mentioned in our previous installments, if you have ceilings higher than 8 feet, internal braces may be a problem.) Make a mark for the upper hole where the wire will come out of the wall, preferably directly behind the speaker.

Next, prep the pull string and chain, as described in the second post for Part 1. Hold the pull string/chain against the wall at the mark for the upper hole and adjust the length so that the chain dangles about a half-inch below where the lower hole will be just above the top of the baseboard. Have a helper mark the lower hole location for you. It is imperative that two holes be in perfect alignment. At the same time, wrap a piece of electrical tape on the pull string where the upper hole is. This will let you know how far to drop the pull string/chain into the wall to reach the lower hole.

Next, drill your two holes. Ideally, the holes should be just a bit large than the wire’s diameter. (CL-2 and -3 wiring is round, which makes it a better choice for this than regular zip-cord speaker wire).

Now drop the pull string in the upper hole, chain first, all the way to the tape mark. Poke your telescoping magnet “antenna” into the lower hole; it will grab the chain and you can pull it out of the wall. If the chain won’t come out of the wall, that means it’s bunched up on the magnet. Get a helper to raise the string up a couple inches and then slowly lower it, until the magnet snags the very end of it. You’ll be able to feel it when that happens. Or, you can just drill out the hole larger. Of course, since this going to be visible, I’m sure you’d prefer to keep the hole as small as possible.

Voila! You now have a pull string in place to pull the speaker wire up the wall. Cool, huh?

You can cut the chain off the pull string now; we don’t need it any more (but keep it for the next location!). You may want to tape the upper end of the pull string to a screwdriver for the time being, to keep it from falling into the wall.

If you’re using in-wall rated wire, strip back the outer jacket couple of inches, exposing the two inner conductors. If you’re using regular zip-cord-type speaker wire, split out the two individual leads an inch or so. Whichever wire you’re using, cut off one of the leads; we don’t need both for what’s next.

Use your wire strippers to strip the insulation off the remaining conductor an inch or so and bend it in a “U” shape and tie the pull string around it so that the “U” hooks in the loop of the knot. Using the electrical tape, wrap over the speaker wire, knot and pull string in a nice, smooth spiral. Remember that we want to minimize bulges, as described in the previous segments. We have an additional wrinkle here, in that the knot/tape combination absolutely must be a smaller diameter than the holes we’re going through! That’s why we cut off one of the leads, to make sure that’s what we’d have once everything was taped and ready to pull in.

It should be easy now to pull the string hanging from the upper hole, and pull the speaker wire into the lower hole, up the wall and out the upper hole. If your holes are really snug you might want to get someone to feed the speaker wire through the bottom hole while you pull out the top.

The “wireless” method

If you’re after the clean installation with no wires showing, with the wire going into the wall below the carpet level, it’s unavoidable that you’ll first have to cut a hole in the wall just above the baseboard. This process is similar to what I described in Part 2, Dealing with a Cross Brace in the Wall, so refer to that segment for clarifications, especially the after-the-fact sheetrock repair.

Once you have your hole cut above the baseboard, you’ll see the bottom plate board inside the wall. The problem facing us is that if we drill into the baseboard below the carpet level, the bottom plate is right behind it. So what we need to do is route the wire through the bottom plate to get it into the wall cavity. Relax, it’s not a tough as it sounds!

Once again we’ll call upon our electric drill and 3/4”auger to drill a hole into the bottom plate. If you have a concrete foundation, watch out for bottoming out the auger! You don’t want to ruin it, so go slow and stop as soon as you feel some resistance.

Once the hole is drilled in the bottom plate, pull back the carpet from the wall. Using the 12” or longer drill bit, drill into the baseboard as low as you can. Naturally, you have to make sure you’re below the top of the carpet (you might want to mark that on the baseboard with a pencil). Drill into the baseboard directly perpendicular to the 3/4” auger bit hole; you want a “direct hit” into the auger hole.

Drilling into baseboard a.jpg

It should be obvious at this point that the reason a long drill bit is preferred here is so that we can make the hole in the baseboard as straight-on and perpendicular to the larger hole in the bottom plate board as possible. With a short drill bit, the drilling angle will increase, which may result in bottoming out at the foundation before you reach the auger hole. If that happens, you may be forced to move your hole higher, which might make it end up “above grade” and visible. (Note: It is not necessary to notch out the tack strip like the picture above shows. I had to do that because I was bringing the wire out under the carpet from the wall.)

With both holes drilled, tape your speaker wire to the pull string, using the single-lead “U” technique described above. Poke the pull string into the baseboard and pull it out of the 3/4” auger-bit hole with the needle nose pliers. Once you have the pull string you can pull in the wire. With the small holes and sharp bend it'll be slow going, but you should have no trouble getting your speaker wire into the wall. This picture should help illustrate, even though I was routing the wire from in-wall to out-of-wall.

Pulling wire through baseboard a.jpg

At this point you can follow the instructions given above for the “Easy Method” to get the wire up to where you want it to come out of the wall. Naturally, if you’re so inclined you can use a binding-post wall plate up at the speaker location.

Once you have your speaker wire in place, tack the carpet back down and patch the hole in the wall, as detailed in the Part 2 Cross Brace segment.

If you have hardwood floors...

Hardwood or laminate floors are a bit of a challenge. The only options I know of aren’t easy or pretty. In the “not pretty” department, you can run your wire in a surface-mounted wire channel product such as Wiremold or Panduit.

I recommend securing the channel to your baseboard with small #4 sheetmetal screws and not the adhesive tape wire channel products often come with. Down the road if you ever want to remove it, it’s fairly easy to spackle over a small hole and re-paint or stain. Getting rid of adhesive tape residue – total nightmare.

In the “not so easy” department, you can pull the quarter-round or shoe molding and drop the speaker wire into the gap that’s typically between the floor and baseboard.


Please address any questions or discussion to this thread. Experienced installers are encouraged to add their own tips!