Blog / renovation
Decide these five things before the drywall goes on
Five low-voltage decisions to lock in before drywall: cable drops, conduit, camera positions, access point locations, and the network closet.
If you are renovating or building this year, there is a short window when running cable costs almost nothing and after which it costs a fortune. That window closes the day the drywall goes on.
Framing season is when I get the calls I can actually help with cheaply. The sad calls come a year later, from people staring at a finished wall wondering what it would cost to get a camera on that corner of the house. So here is the list I wish every builder handed to every client: five decisions to make while the studs are still visible.
Where the cabling drops go
Walk the framed space and decide where you will ever want a wired connection: TV locations, desks, the mechanical room, anywhere a streaming box or console will live. Then add drops you are not sure about, because the marginal cost of an extra run while walls are open is small. The cost of the same run after drywall, fishing through insulated exterior walls or across finished ceilings, is many times that.
Pull at least Cat6, and run two cables to any location that matters instead of one. The second cable costs a few dollars of copper and saves you the day the first one is damaged or the day one device becomes two.
Where the conduit goes
Cable solves today. Conduit solves the years you cannot predict. A few runs of inexpensive plastic conduit from the basement to the attic, and out to any detached garage or outbuilding, mean that whatever cable standard matters in fifteen years can be pulled without opening a single wall.
You do not need conduit everywhere. You need it on the paths that will be hardest to reopen: between floors, to exterior soffits, under the slab to the garage. Leave a pull string in every run. This is the cheapest insurance in the entire building.
Where the cameras point
Camera positions have to be decided before drywall because good camera locations are almost never near existing wiring. Soffit corners, eaves over doors, the peak of the garage: these spots want a cable run while the framing is open.
Stand where each camera would mount and check what it actually sees. Cover the approaches: driveway, front door, rear entry. Decide now, run cable to every plausible position even if you only install cameras at some of them, and cap the rest in the wall. A capped, labelled cable behind a blank plate costs nearly nothing and turns a future camera into a twenty-minute job.
Where the access points mount
Wi-Fi radios work best mounted on the ceiling, centrally, away from the mess of the mechanical room. That means ceiling drops, and ceiling drops mean deciding before the drywall which ceilings get them.
One drop per floor, roughly central, is the right starting point for most houses; large or long layouts may want two. The mistake I see constantly is skipping this entirely on the theory that the router by the modem will cover the house. It will not, and the fix afterward is either ugly, mediocre, or expensive.
Where the closet lives
Everything above terminates somewhere, and that somewhere deserves five minutes of thought. Pick a spot that is central, ventilated, dry, and has power: a utility room shelf, a proper structured-wiring cabinet, a corner of the basement that is not beside the water heater.
The classic failure is letting every cable default to wherever the electrician was standing, which is how networks end up in unventilated crawl spaces and above garage ceilings. Decide the location first and every other run gets simpler, because they all have the same destination.
Getting it done
None of this is expensive. All of it is time-sensitive, and a builder's electrician will happily rough in low-voltage runs if someone hands them a clear plan before the insulation goes in. If you would rather have specialists do the low-voltage work itself, RelayPoint Technologies does exactly this kind of install across Southern Ontario, and they are the sort of outfit whose quotes pass the tests I described in my piece on cabling quote red flags.
My own part in these projects is the plan: what to run, where, and what to skip. If you have a build or renovation coming up this spring, a short planning engagement before the walls close is a fixed fee, and it is the one point in the project where a few hours of thought is worth more than any amount of equipment later. If the drywall date is already close, get in touch sooner rather than later.