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Chronicling other people's lavish custom installations and home theaters is one thing. Trying to install a system essentially by yourself on a far more modest budget is quite another. At least that's what I found out when I began planning the entertainment and networking systems for the extension I'm adding to my house in Nyack, New York, which is about 30 miles north of New York City along the Hudson River. And because my hands-on project is probably like what many of you are attempting in your own homes, S&V will be detailing my experiences — both good and bad — over a series of articles as the project unfolds.

Nyack is well known for its historic Victorian homes; mine, unfortunately, isn't one of them. Rather, it was the house's location right on the Hudson that spurred my wife and me to buy it three-and-a-half years ago as a weekend getaway.

But now that we have a 2-year-old son and are thinking about giving up our New York City apartment, the two-bedroom, one-bath house is just too small to be a full-time residence. That's why we decided to build an addition that will essentially double the floor space to a still decidedly non-mansion-like 2,400 square feet (not including a new basement).

The addition, at the rear of the existing house, creates three new living areas: an open first-floor kitchen and living room, a second-floor master bedroom/bathroom suite, and a large basement. Since the first-floor area will be our main family/entertainment room, we know we want a large-screen HDTV and a surround sound system there. We also plan to have an HDTV in the master bedroom, and probably a small LCD TV in the kitchen area. The basement will have a dedicated home theater room plus a small recording studio.

In the master bedroom, the bed will go on the wall opposite the 42-inch plasma TV. Ethernet connections to either side of the head-board will make it easy for Jim and his wife to jack in their laptops.

We want all the rooms in the addition to be on a home network so we can access the Internet or share music stored on a PC or music server. Because of cost and complexity, we ruled out whole-house audio and advanced home-automation systems.

Going into the project, I knew there'd be several challenges. The most immediate is financial, as our construction budget doesn't allow for new audio or video gear, or for a finished basement. So I plan to use as much of my existing gear as possible, and I'll be flooring, framing, insulating, and dry-walling the basement myself. Since we don't already own a projector, a screen, or theater-style seating, I won't be able to start on the home theater until all the other rooms are done. But, knowing I'll need extra ceiling clearance in the basement to either construct soffits around the heating and air-conditioning ducts or hide them in a dropped acoustic-tile ceiling, I've had the foundation excavated a foot deeper than usual at the nominal cost of about $250.

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The other challenge is aesthetic. I've promised my wife — who's been living patiently with not only a ridiculous amount of A/V gear, but some 30-odd guitars and a handful of vintage guitar amps — that the new living-room area will remain clean and uncluttered. The 28 x 18-foot room has an open floor plan, with the kitchen separated from the main living space only by a large center island with seating. To take advantage of the river view, almost the entire back of the house is windows, with large doors that open onto an elevated cedar deck.

Looking from the living room into the kitchen area before drywall and cabinet installation (top) and after (above). Cables for the rear surround speakers hang from the ceiling.

While we left most of the equipment-buying decisions for later in the project, the space's open design and lack of interior walls essentially ruled out using any of my current floorstanding speakers. Having been impressed by their sound quality and reasonable price, I chose Sonance's Symphony S623T in-wall speakers for the left, center, and right channels, and three S623TR ceiling models for the surrounds. Also, because the space will be bright, I had to rule out rear-projection DLP or LCD high-def TVs in favor of a wall-mounted plasma display, which will also help maintain the room's streamlined appearance.

Fortunately, the upstairs bedroom will be easier to outfit. Since we'll be moving our son, Tyler, from his nursery to our old bedroom, which is adjacent to the new master bedroom, we decided to forego an elaborate A/V system as we'll likely be keeping the volume low or listening via wireless headphones. We do know that we'll need a TV with a fairly large screen, since it probably will be placed on or against a wall that's a fair distance — about 20 feet — from the bed.

One thing I've learned from writing about other people's installations is the importance of wiring the house before the sheetrock is installed. To save money, I initially planned to pull the RG6 coaxial and Cat5e cables myself, but my electrician convinced me he could do the job at minimal cost, since he already had to drill holes through the studs and joists. Happy to have one less project on my plate, I agreed — and soon made my first big mistake.

About the same time the electricians were finishing the wiring, I visited a nearby house where an expensive home theater and custom whole-house audio system were being installed. While I was there, I mentioned to Barry Weiner — owner of Hudson Valley Home Media, the Sparkill, New York custom-installation firm handling the project — that I was in the midst of my own more modest installation. After discovering that we lived just a few blocks apart, Weiner agreed to stop by to see how my project was going.

After a quick survey, Weiner said, "If this were my house, I'd rip out all the low-voltage wires and start over." While I'd been nervous about how close some of the A/V cables were to the higher-voltage electric lines, I'd assumed the electricians knew what they were doing. Now I was a bit more concerned, particularly since the walls were scheduled to be sheetrocked in just two days.

"Like many projects where the electricians do all the wiring, there were two immediate issues," Weiner explains. "The low-voltage wires were strung too close to the high-voltage lines, and there weren't enough runs. Of particular concern were long parallel runs where the electrical and A/V wires were strung just a few inches apart for almost the entire length of a joist, which could generate noise and interference on the network and cause 60-cycle hum bars to appear on the TVs."

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Seeing my predicament, Weiner said he would send a crew to the house to fix the problem if I could hold off the dry wall. Even though the delay would have a domino effect on other aspects of the job, I readily consented, and a few days later a two-man crew arrived and rewired the entire addition, making sure that the high- and low-voltage wires were at least 6 inches apart, and that all intersections were made at 90° angles. Also, where the electricians had run a single RG6 and Cat5e cable to each location, the Hudson Valley Home Media crew pulled three or four runs of each. They also wired Tyler's bedroom, and installed additional RG45 telecom and RG6 cable jacks in the kitchen and master bedroom so we'd have greater placement flexibility and access.

The plasma TV will go on the wall opposite the bed, between the bathroom and walk-in closet.

Weiner explains that he always runs extra wires as a way of future-proofing an installation. "You don't want to start ripping up sheetrock six months after a project is finished," he says. "Plus, the wire itself is relatively cheap — it's the labor that's expensive, so the cost to pull six wires instead of one is marginal."

The installers' practiced eyes also found several things I'd overlooked. For example, they pointed out that the living-room plasma TV needed a recessed clock outlet so the power cord wouldn't show, and that a stud below the TV had to be cut and framed to accommodate the horizontally mounted center-channel speaker.

While they were there, the installers also ran all the wires for the in-wall and ceiling speakers, and mounted cardboard templates on the studs so the dry-wallers would know exactly where to cut small holes for the wires to be pulled through. (I was going to leave the wires coiled in the walls and ceiling and hope my measurements were accurate enough to find them.)

If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, I'd just found out the hard way that it can also be expensive. All told, it took the installers about 17 hours to pre-wire the addition, which at $100 an hour (rates vary by region and installer), came to $1,700. While that's not exactly chump change, in hindsight, it's a small price to pay compared to the cost, time, and aggravation of having to rip out sheetrock to correct the problem after the rooms were done.

In the next installment, Jim will discuss his equipment choices, the installation of the gear, deciding on a remote control to operate it all, and his plans for creating the home theater and recording studio in the basement.

House that Jim Built: Part Two
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