Housing project complete: wall speakers!

No photos to accompany this until it's prettier, but one of the rooms now includes in-wall speakers. Woo! All the better to rock out with.

Sticking speakers into the wall means audio hardware, tools to cut a hole, and wiring to tie them together. I used three things.

1. $50 Muro Concept 6 Indoor-Outdoor speakers from Buy.com
2. $6 two-speaker wall plate from Amazon.com
3. $0 speaker wire (~20') culled from every guy's Big Box o' Cables

The Muros don't use a special speaker case, so only need 4" of in-wall clearance. Preparing the space meant cutting into the strange wall that separates the main bedroom and office. I call it "strange" because of the secrets and bits of history thus revealed.

1. Top layer: tag board
2. Next layer: sheetrock
3. Third layer: lathed plaster
4. Fourth layer (on one side): plywood

That last one covered a door-sized opened now filled with insulation, so the two rooms probably joined up the past. One thing's for sure: the house's previous owners would much rather layer over a problem than fix it properly. We saved a (future) step by removing the tag board entirely and plan to repaint the sheetrock later on. (This will also look 10 times better than crappy 70s particle board.)

Putting something inside a wall takes an act of faith and willingness to fail. After all, who knows what's behind it until there's a really big hole? Did that stud finder miss something? (Four layers of stuff definitely confused the readings.)

Fortunately, most of my cutting went into open space and we created no disaster cleanup scenarios. The toughest part proved the plywood and sheetrock, which had very little space between. We solved the problem by wedging some space at the top and bottom of the wall, taping the wire to a couple of 9-volt batteries,  and dropping the whole mess between them.

Once the wire got through, it proved relatively simple to hook up the wall plate. We stuck the resulting contraption over an unused telephone box and hid the loose wiring behind the baseboard. Success! The speakers sound sharp and we gain further knowledge of what is actually behind the painted facade of our 100+ year-old house. Whether we tell the next owners what's going on in the walls remains to be seen.