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Multiple TV screens give a billiard room the perfect atmosphere.
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By Daniel C. Brown
Want your favorite music to greet you when you step in the door at home? How about your bath water drawn at the same time every night? Want a home theatre? Or a billiard room with a TV screen hanging in every corner?
Using one part surgery and one part acrobatics, Todd McNurlin and his technicians run the cable and wires to make all those things happen for clients in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. Jobs can include wiring for whole-house automation, distributed music, home theatres, security, lighting controls and central cleaning systems.
"My guys are a group of surgeons," says Todd. "We often work in homes worth $1 million or more, and sometimes the sculpture that we're drilling beside is worth more than the home. Or we might be working close to a piece of art worth half a million dollars."
Find the points of access
In his position as senior design engineer for Audio Video Planners Inc., Oakdale, Minn., much of Todd's work takes place at existing homes, so damage control is a daily concern. The key to running wires through existing walls, says Todd, is to look for points of access or channels that may already exist to the home's interior structure:
- Old laundry chutes
- Floor joists that run in the desired direction over an unfinished basement
- Attics that provide widespread access to the rooms below
- Interior wall cavities
- Carefully sawn holes to link one floor to another
Todd tells the story of an older home in the historic district of St. Paul, near the governor's mansion. The client wanted music and a security system throughout the home. That involved distributing wires into six rooms on the second floor -- quite a challenge until Todd and his crew found an old laundry chute that had been closed off with sheet rock.
The attic was wide open, so the crew brought up two dozen boxes of wire into the attic and started there. Using a flexible drill bit, a technician in the attic worked from inside the top of the laundry chute, holding the drill horizontally while the bit drilled upward. That hole provided access through the top of the laundry chute and into the attic. Other crew members then created a bundle of wires and pulled them from the attic down the laundry chute to equipment in the home's lower levels.
From the central distribution point in the attic, wires could splay out and run down into the second-story rooms. "Often it's better to work from the top down, because you can let gravity work for you," says Todd.
Squeeze on in
Being an acrobat is another key that comes into play when your technicians must crawl into tight spaces. "I've had guys crawl between joists and support their weight by pushing outward. You wiggle through and hope you don't catch a nail, says Todd. "I've even dangled guys from their feet inside walls. We've never had to cut open a wall to get a guy out, but once one of our workers got stuck for an hour."
For some major projects, Todd arranges to send clients on vacations while the work is being done. He writes the trip's cost into the contract. Often the cost of the vacation is at least partly offset by the savings in time that results from not having to close access points every night and open them again every morning to accommodate the lifestyle of the homeowner.
Now that's good customer service: giving clients a couple of weeks in Cancun and finishing their project in record time.
Maybe this writer needs a new intercom ...
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