Price of hiding wire in-wall?

This depends a lot on the job. I think I've had friends who have paid that. It all depends on the amount of time it's going to take and the degree of difficulty. Sometimes you don't really know what's in walls of people's homes until you get there. Obstacles like fireplaces, HVAC ducts and electric wires make things even harder. And I suspect your real problem is running stuff through your ceiling, which is always an adventure.

My wife and I have a general contractor who has helped me with this kind of work before and he's very good at it. Since he's a builder, he knows the decisions other builders do in walls that might make it difficult for a typical home theater installer. For example, when I needed speaker wire pulled to a left and right spots bordering a living room fireplace, it looked like a piece of cake since the wire just needed to traverse under the floor through an easily accessible unfinished basement. I'd done this before with other rooms. But the wall in question was an exterior wall that was oddly positioned on the foundation, likely because of the fireplace. I didn't have the experience to do the drilling without accidentally coming up at the baseboard, or worse, the hardwood floor. My contractor figured it out and the job was perfect.

If you've got a guy like that you trust (especially if he has experience doing electrical work), you might ask him. You might also ask some electrical contractors anyway...they may come in cheaper than the AV guys. Electric guys won't help you with speaker mounts, but most aren't hard to do yourself (except maybe your ceiling stuff).

Being an installer I can vouch for the 1K price tag....Most clients are of the thought that " its just running some wires in the attic "... Well if you've ever crawled around in an attic full of insulation you might have a better appreciation for the labor involved...Especially here in Texas where the attic temps in the summertime can reach 120+ degrees.... Added to this scenario ( you havent been specific here) is how many of the walls are exterior walls...It is much more tedious to drill and fish wires to an exterior wall if the roof line is on top of these walls ....or if any of these walls are adjoining to say bathrooms where plumbing needs to be found before any wires can be pulled....Although its only a 1 day job , its mainly the knowledge of the laborer involved in foreseeing and working through the unknowns - and there is ALWAYS at least 1 unforeseen problem that must be dealt with - 1 common example are fire blocks ( mandatory in all exterior walls in Tx) So my point is its always more than meets the eye with retro pulling 7.1 wiring....good luck with your new system and be sure to use a quality wire....lddude:

RTS100x5 said:

Being an installer I can vouch for the 1K price tag....Most clients are of the thought that " its just running some wires in the attic "... Well if you've ever crawled around in an attic full of insulation you might have a better appreciation for the labor involved...Especially here in Texas where the attic temps in the summertime can reach 120+ degrees.... Added to this scenario ( you havent been specific here) is how many of the walls are exterior walls...It is much more tedious to drill and fish wires to an exterior wall if the roof line is on top of these walls ....or if any of these walls are adjoining to say bathrooms where plumbing needs to be found before any wires can be pulled....Although its only a 1 day job , its mainly the knowledge of the laborer involved in foreseeing and working through the unknowns - and there is ALWAYS at least 1 unforeseen problem that must be dealt with - 1 common example are fire blocks ( mandatory in all exterior walls in Tx) So my point is its always more than meets the eye with retro pulling 7.1 wiring....good luck with your new system and be sure to use a quality wire....lddude:

Click to expand...

He's right...and it certainly can be harder than it looks. Another story with my contractor...six years ago I wanted to wire the entire house for CAT-5/6 Ethernet. The project was an offshoot of my kitchen remodel and as any installer will tell you, it's a lot easier to run cable when their no drywall. So the kitchen's wine nook got two Cat 5 wires and coax cables for future expansion all brought to a Leviton faceplate. I did the dual Cat 5 because I wanted the wireless router to go there (it was the most central location) but I needed two wires back to the basement...one for the cable modem (WAN) and the second (LAN) back to the main switch. Since the basement is open, it's pretty easy to get all of the rooms on the ground floor wired (save the living room, which I discussed earlier).

The hard part was the second floor bedrooms. My house is about 20 years old and I wanted some way to string at least one and preferably several CAT-6 wires to the attic where then we could run lines to the walls of the three bedrooms plus an additional one to replace a hard phone line, and two more for future expansion. But where is a good place to run the wire? Outside up the main wall on the side of the house? That was possible but I wanted to remove the existing coax wire up the side of the house since I was dismantling the satellite dishes. The kitchen renovation revealed a way to do it on an inside wall right next to where we were running wires for the wireless router. The hard part was breaching the wood between the floors of the house.

This is where having a contractor came in handy (and FYI, this same contractor did my kitchen renovation). We figured the place where we needed to drill an access whole was behind a wall in the master bedroom. So he cut out a small piece of drywall enough to see inside and get a drill in. After measuring where we thought the hole needed to be half a dozen times, we drilled the hole and then did the same thing in the attic above. Then we dropped a weighted string line starting from the attic, through the hole between floors and finally through the last hole drilled between the ground floor and the basement. The measurements were good enough that it wasn't long before we got the line fished through.

Then we tied the fish line to a a rope made of the nine CAT-6 cables we wanted all wrapped with duct tape. It wasn't easy getting the rope through the holes (especially with the smallest between floors) but we got it done. The rope of CAT-6 had every line premeasured for 100 ft (the limits of the Ethernet standard). Once in the attic we had enough extra distance to get to every place we wanted...well, almost every place. We were unable to run the line to the outlet in my son's bedroom due to some kind of obstruction in the wall...most likely an attachment point of the home theater room structure which is adjacent to it. Since it wasn't a huge deal to have a working line in that room, we decided not to waste valuable time there.

The last job was the close the opening in the bedroom wall (before my wife saw it!). My contractor patched up the hole and repainted the wall in a way that I can't tell where the hole was to this day. His work is incredible...far better than if I'd tried the same thing. After that it was just patching the cable to some Leviton faceplates and I was good to go.

Enjoyed your story, Sevenfeet! :T

Yup, two-story houses can be a challenge. We got lucky with ours; there were enough little attic spaces here and there to access the places on the first floor where we needed to get wires to.

One location in particular was a challenge though, for the rear surround speakers. I decided to bolt them directly to the wall, which required bringing the wire out the wall from directly behind them. The problem was that the preferred mounting location was directly between the floors! IOW, it was above the ceiling of the first story, but below the floor of the second story!

The finished product looks pretty neat, like the speakers are just floating up there with no visible means of support, but it was certainly the trickiest rear-speaker install I’ve ever done!




Regards,
Wayne