5/26/15 - Structured Wiring Walkthrough

Earlier today I got a call from Steve over at Structured Cable of VA asking if I would be able to meet him out at the house this evening to do a walkthrough and go over all of our choices and locations before the guys go in to do all the wiring.   The framing is all done and the roof is on, so I guess now we get into the fun stuff.  As I said many posts ago, this part of the build is my baby so to speak.  My wife gave me free reign to do what I see fit here more or less, so to finally get to walk around and lay it out is awesome!

I posted in a previous post about what all we had decided to add at this stage.  We plan to use the main part of our basement as a theater room, so we opted to prewire the ceiling for a projector as well as setting it up for in ceiling surround sound.  There is a utility room in the basement that houses the furnace and water heater, so I am having all the cabling run into there, where with the help of an IR repeater I can have a fairly stealthy installation without a ton of equipment littering the room.

Another thing I addressed with Steve during the walk-through was our desire to have POE video cameras at the front and back of the house overlooking the main entry points.  For those that aren't familiar with a POE Camera, it's basically a hard wired camera setup that uses a typical ethernet connection for power and signal.  By using a good quality camera with a nice field of view we will have pretty good coverage of the rear of our property as well as the front door/driveway and the street out front as well.  To some this may seem overkill, but it's a small price to pay for a little piece of mind.

We hadn't discussed the cameras during our initial meeting, but we had originally planned to have cable and data run into all 4 bedrooms, and as our plans for the house have evolved, we realized that it wasn't really needed so we were able to swap out two of those connections for data wiring to the front and rear doors.

Other than that change, it was all pretty smooth.  We got to walk all three floors and point out and mark where we wanted everything to go, from the alarm panel and volume controls for the in-ceiling audio in the kitchen and the prewire for deck speakers, to the surround sound locations and cable/data jacks.  As always Steve was extremely helpful and courteous and took time to go over it all with us as well as give his input/advice where needed.  After all, he has far more experience in these matters than we do, so an educated opinion is always welcome.

Next up is our pre-drywall meeting.  We noticed today while we were there that a lot of the HVAC stuff was already installed and our bathroom fixtures were sitting in the garage with lots of piping and stuff for the plumbing, so that will probably be the next thing up.

And since everyone loves pictures, here is a shot of one of my cars in front of it's soon to be new home!