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More audio installation
I made a little more progress today; I pulled 3 more runs. The first being the Cat 6 for my office; that was easy as I was just replacing some Cat 5. The next 2 proved very challenging as I had to spend time in the sweltering hot attic. After a few tries attempting to fish the wires down the wall in the attic, I remembered I had a 3 ft drill bit my dad let me borrow. That did the trick to get the wires where I needed. In this particular room, I decided to use a low voltage add on box that clips to a regular box. Getting it in was a little tricky, but doable. The volume control had to be nudged into the box as the add on box must have been designed for low voltage outlets or something else with lots of wiggle room. However, when I went to put the cover plate on, I realized that the original box was a bit wider than normal boxes, so the cover plate didn't fit. A little work with a drill on another switch to move the mounting holes yielded a perfect fit. Despite the extra work involved, I really like the look of the light switch and volume control in one cover plate. I'm not sure if I'm going to do this for the other 3 that I have like this.
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Home Depot
I went to the closest Home Depot today to get some low voltage boxes and covers for my home audio system (I managed to pull 4 runs of cable today!) and couldn't fit a 12 port, 2 gang wall plate. I asked an associated if he could check to see if another store had them before I wasted my time and gas going there. He said that usually all the Home Depots carry the same products and he had never seen it before. He looked it up on the computer and found that they had 21 in stock. Great, I only needed 2. So we go back to the aisle and look at the overhead bins for the stock number and he couldn't find it. Uggh. Off I went to Lowe's (it was closer than the next Home Depot). No luck. Then 20 minutes to the next Home Depot where I found what them! Perfect, wasted an extra 35 minutes and half a gallon of gas (about $1.45 these days) because the guy in Home Depot couldn't find inventory.
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Home Audio System - Doh!
I couldn't sleep last night and finally realized why. In all my planning for the audio system, I seem to have left out connectors for half the speakers. I planned for one wire for left and one wire for right. Obviously there are two wires for right and two for left. That means I need to order more connectors from DeepSurplus and goto Home Depot to get some more low voltage boxes. I feel like such an idiot; this project probably would get done much faster and correct the first time if I hired a professional, but then I wouldn't get the joy of knowing I did most of the work myself.
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Home Audio System - Weekend Update
Since I had some spare time this weekend and still don't have anyone to pull my cable, I went ahead and started tackling the project. First off, I installed a light switch (not really part of the audio system, but part of moving our family room) which only took 3 hours; it shouldn't have taken that long, but getting the old single gang box out took far longer than it should have and getting all the wires back in was a royal pain. Next up, I decided to run a few runs of cable. This turned out to be an interesting task. I knew there was some access to our walls from the garage and had been told by the previous owner that the owner before him had a darkroom in the back of a storage area; this got drywalled in some time ago. I chopped out some drywall and discovered the "hidden" room. Running the wires was relatively easy, but extremely time consuming. 2 runs down, 26 more to go.