How to Hide Surround Sound Wires.

This long term sub position is taking it out of me! Thank goodness for the weekend, it's been so nice to wind down and focus on the house again. The actual job is going great, I love my kids, but there wasn't much preparation for my position, so I've had to do a lot of lesson planning which isn't normally required. My mom (who teaches 6th grade math at the same school) has been helping me loads though! It's so nice to work with and learn from her :)

So this technically happened last week, but I didn't have time to blog about it during the week, sorry!

We've been focusing on the mancave lately, and decided to move the 42 in flat screen to that room instead of the 32 in. Mainly because of the lighting-- the 42 in is a plasma, and it got way too much glare in the living room. But also because we want that room to feel like a movie room so the bigger size just fit better.

Moving the big TV in meant that we could hang up the surround sound set thingy, and Rob used his master mind and manly muscles to figure out a way to hide all the ugly wires. Why do they make the wires so colorful?? It looks stupid just dangling down the wall.

(The speaker is sitting on top of the TV in this picture, the cord doesn't stretch across the wall normally!)

We decided to run the wires along the insides of the walls. We did each side of the TV differently because we are silly and didn't think of the best way to do it til we got the other side. Oh well. Essentially all you do is get a spade bit for your drill (or dremel) and punch a 1/2 in. hole into your drywall at the spot where your speaker will hang, and then down at the bottom of the wall near the baseboards.  Make sure you are drilling over an empty space in the wall-- no studs! Push the drill lightly, you don't want to go all the way through to the wall on the other side either. Then just feed in the wires into the top hole. That hole will be hidden by the surround speaker that's mounted on the wall.

To get the wires back out of the wall, shine a tiny light into the hole and use a pair of tweezers (bonus points if they're leopard print!) Ignore the annoying cat that's curious. 

Sorry it's blurry, but he got it out! 

I won't lie, it's tedious trying to find and get that cord back out of the wall, we both got short tempered, but by me wiggling the top wire, he was able to find it at the bottom and drag it out.

And yes it makes a mess on your carpet! Ha. Now you won't have annoying dangling cords though! 

We tucked the remaining cord into the space between the carpet and the baseboards, painted the 2 in. of wires showing across the baseboard white to match, and called it a day. You'll see the final product in a few days when I show off the painted mancave! Yep, and it's now a gorgeous color ;)

Like I said though, we hid the wires for the two different side speakers differently. For the right speaker we just drilled through both walls and fed the wire into the closet and back out. It was SO easy, and you won't see it unless you go into our walk in closet. We couldn't do this on the other side though because the wall on the other side isn't in a closet, it's in our downstairs bathroom... we don't want guests seeing a random cord entering and disappearing!! 

In all then, there are two ways of hiding these wires:

1.) Drilling into both walls and feeding the wires in and out. This is very easy as you can actually see the wire to poke it back out. 

2.) OR, drill halfway into the space between studs and feed the wire through-- using tweezers, flashlight, and patience to get it back out again. 

And now the mancave looks much more stream lined. We're going to do this to hide the power cord for our flat screen in the living room too.