The theater room previously had speaker stands for the four corner speakers and a box holding up the center channel. I decided to go with a wall mount since it would look a little nicer and free up some floor space. The only problem was getting the wires down the wall cleanly.
I ended up running them inside the walls. The rear speakers were fairly simple because there’s no insulation in that wall. I drilled a small hole at the top and a little bigger hole at the bottom. It took some work with the fish tape but I got those pretty easily. I was able to modify the speaker mounts from MonoPrice so that the wire appears to come directly out of the mount and right into the speaker, and I used the mounts upside down so they’d fit my speakers.
For the front speakers, I had to make a three sided cut at the bottom of the wall and fold the drywall back to reach in and grab the fish tape. That meant more spackling and texturing to patch the hole, but there was no other way to find the fish tape in the wall.
The speaker wire was a 100ft spool of wire from MonoPrice rated for in-wall use. I suppose I could have switched to something else once I got out of the wall, but I just stuck with it for the whole run.
I had initially intended to pull the baseboards off and hide the wire behind/under them, but there’s too much cable and too little space with my mini-half-height baseboards. Instead I picked up some Baseboard Cablemate strips from Home Depot. It should just look like I have thick baseboards when I’m done running the wires inside there.
And finally, the last piece to the puzzle was mounting the center channel. It doesn’t have a place to screw in a speaker mount like the other speakers. I picked up some 6” shelf brackets from Home Depot, but I’m not happy with how they look. My new plan is to build a small box with an open front, mount that on the wall and then place the speaker inside it. The wires would run out through a hole in the back and in to the wall.
This project is coming together nicely! I have a pile of paint swatches on my desk. Picking the color will be the next step. Right now I’m leaning toward a dark gray but I’m not sure if I’ll throw in a blue tint.
PS. In case you haven’t noticed by now, I love MonoPrice. If you ever need any kind of cable, go there first. Why pay $40 for an HDMI cable from Best Buy when the same thing is $3 from MonoPrice?
We’ve had an interesting winter. It started off with a bang, dried out for quite a while, and now we’re getting alternating snow dumps and rain. I skipped the pass again this year and again I wonder if that was the right idea. My plan was to pick out the best days, take vacation, and go skiing, but that hasn’t happened yet.
Every October, Microsoft has a big auction for charity. Employees can put things up for other employees to bid on. Four years ago, I won a day of semi-professional ski photography. 
We have a row of arbor vitae trees in the backyard. They provide a nice visual block between us and the neighbors, but during the recent snow storm, they took quite a beating. The tops of the trees were bent down so far that I could hit them with a broom!
Very shortly after buying the projector, I built a simple shelf mount for it. It was easier and cheaper than hanging it from the ceiling and the Epson 8350 has awesome lens shift so I was still able to get the picture in the right spot. However, the cables were left dangling down the wall. I finally got around to fixing that this past weekend.
Remodeling
For the last couple years, I’ve been the property guy at church. Normally it’s just small tasks and general upkeep, but late last summer, I started a huge project. The church received a very large anonymous donation designated for remodeling the house that’s on the church property.
In the past, the house has been used as a place for our Pastor’s to live, a place for our teachers to live, and extra space for classes and events. It has been falling in to disrepair and that seems to have accelerated the last couple years since no one was living there.
I gathered a bunch of input from people who had lived there before and other congregation members, got bids from two contractors, and finally signed a contract. There’s way too much to cover here, but this is a small subset of the improvements we made:
I was responsible for drawing up the basic plans and work item list, but from that point I handed over the reigns. Our general contractor was Jim Lawrence of Lawrence Construction Company and I highly recommend him. We’ll hopefully be giving him a call in the future for some work on our house. He finished the project quickly and did a lot of the interior design himself which removed a lot of decisions from my plate.
It would be much better if we had more “before” pictures, but here’s comparison of the old kitchen and the old kitchen to give you a little taste of the scope of this project.