The family room is going to double as my home theater.  As such, the tv and speakers will be taking a central role in the room.  The big main speakers will be sitting on either side of the tv, but the placement of the rear surround speakers was something of a quandary.  Normally I would just put them on either side of the main couch.  However to the right of the couch is a doorway.  That meant that the left rear had to be moved all the way to this wall.  The speakers are rather large (as bigger speakers provide better sound) which also complicates the placement.  To that end I’ve made a little cubby hole for each one to sit it.  This will allow the speaker to only stick a few inches into the room, as well as hide the wires for it.

The previous owners of our house had done a bit of remodeling to the family room.  Exactly how much is a bit hard to tell, but by looking at the different types of electrical wire it seems that they added some recessed lighting and a motion sensor outside light.   Both of these have switches in the room, and were installed using remodel electrical boxes.   Remodel boxes are attached to the wallboard (in this case wood paneling) and therefore when I removed the paneling they were no longer supported.   I replaced these with some nice new construction boxes (they get nailed directly to a stud), and while I was at it, I decided to add a few more outlets to the room, including this double set which will be behind the TV.

Since the room will be used as a home theater, in addition to the electrical work I also had to run some other wiring, coax for the TV, a network cable for the Xbox, and some speaker wire for the rear surrounds.  The orange ‘box’ is a low voltage box, that is really just a frame with screw holes for a cover plate.  I suppose the ‘proper’ thing to do would be to terminate all the wires in the box and have nice little jacks to plug everything into, but this seemed unnecessary and would be detrimental to the signal from the antenna, as well as to the speakers.  Instead I just left enough wire hanging out to easily reach the TV stand.