subject: Pre Wiring a New Home or Addition [print this page] Pre Wiring a New Home or Addition Pre Wiring a New Home or Addition
Finishing a basement, building an addition or just flat out building a new home can put a lot of things into perspective besides just cost. Your new home is built and you and your family take your first walk through it as owners. You envision the bar being here, the pool table being here, the exercise area being here and the home theater there. Then it hits you. One of the most common things home owners realize after all is said and done is they should have wired for speakers.
Its not uncommon for home owners to forget about wiring. For starters, a lot of people would convince themselves that they would never want speakers here or that they have no need for home audio. While this may be true for the first few years, what about after your family has truly settled in to the home? You develop elaborate ideas for the speaker system of your dreams or to have whole home audio to enhance your home living experience. Those dreams are soon shattered after the installer informs you of how wireless options are limited and usually not reliable, how many holes might need to be cut and spackled up, how you threw away the remaining buckets of paint for those rooms to paint the spackled holes. Suddenly your dream seems just about dead and you start convincing yourself that you never wanted or needed surround sound in the first place. All because you didn't consider the pocket change wiring while the rooms were being built would've been.
Let us assume you may not be interested because of the limited time you plan on spending in the home before it is sold again. Maybe you are having it built for a client. It is very tough to give a real statistic as to exactly how much value pre-wiring a room or whole house for audio would add to the resale value of the home, but the sure thing is that it will be a selling point. It will almost always help get your home sold quicker. Your home and four others on your street are for sale. Aside from updated appliances, yours is the only one with pre-wiring. Besides obvious aesthetic looks of the home, what fact will stand out greatly? The wiring will for sure.
When all is said and done, there's a laundry list of things to be done when building and finishing anything in your home. In the end, the most important thing is that you and your family are happy with how it turned out. Just like technology, though, a room can become obsolete is something new comes out that cannot be applied to it. So just like with the 3D technology now, do not overlook it now when in the short future it may become a feature you enjoy. You may have no use for audio now, but play it safe and wiring for it while you have the chance. It will add the most important thing that you need when considering home automation. Confidence that you planned ahead.
