DIY Sarah

Craft, Decor, Art, Garden, and Dessert

Running Wires Behind Moldings

As a part of our new super awesome, super overkill audio-video setup in the den, we routed a bunch of wires from the “couch” side to the “TV” side. The idea is to keep all the gizmos next to the couch but the tv on the far side of the room. This means we need to run audio and video from one side of the room to the other.

To see what all we’re running, go ahead and check out part one of this post.

To accomplish this feat of cable pulling, I had a moment of inspiration. We ran a whole bundle of wires around the top of the room to tuck neatly behind the molding once it goes up. The corners would be a bit tricky but we are putting a built-in along one wall so the tricky bends will just sit above the bookshelves.

To start out, we glued this single audio wire.  This is a short one just going to the right rear speaker.  It was a nice, lightweight, easy one to glue so it made sense to start with it.

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It was just a matter of using the glue-gun to affix the wire in the corner.  It’s important that you keep every wire as strait as possible.  We are running all this behind molding so neatness is key to keeping it tight and small.

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After the easy audio, we ran the two “white” cables, the shielded audio for the center channel and the coax.  After those came big mambo.  You can see just how big that cable is.  I really had to hold the cable up until the hot glue dried or it would fall creating a big sticky hot-glue mess.  It helped to have a second person holding most of the weight of the cable.  Once the cable is up, each glue glob can hold the few inches of cable up but a single glob can’t hold up all 10 feet of length before the cable reaches the ground.

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After big mambo, we ran the three ethernet cables.  Initially we taped them together since it helped us keep them the same length when we were measuring them.  The tape got in the way of the glueing and we should have separated them and glued them each individually instead of trying to do all three at once.  Cat-6 is very twisty and it took a lot of finagleing to get them to lay strait and even.

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After the ethernet, we had a little pocket to tuck the redmere hdmi into so it went up really quickly.  The toslink optical audio is all that’s left but it’s in the mail.

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You can see the turns are even but it would be tricky to get crown molding over that.  If you were adapting this method just to run audio for surround sound and you were just using audio cable, this would definitely work but for these big hdmi cables, the corners aren’t tight enough.  Luckily for us, the built-ins will get the job done just fine. We had some issues with the moldings having a huge amount of mold we we had to get it treated and call in Teammicrotech.com/services/mold-remediation/ to help us out with it.

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We cut a hole with the milwaukee 48-11-1890 and dropped the cables down to where a box will sit next to the TV mount.  Yes, our hole is a bit big but it’s really hard to find studs in a plaster and lath wall and we cut the whole wrong the first time!  More patching is more mess but it can’t be helped.

The den is really coming along well.  I’ve got a rug to show you, a new couch on it’s way, and hopefully a giant, not ugly, cat climbing pole soon.

Sarah

Categories
Den, Nerd, Rooms