Running Entertainment System Wires

I am hooking up a flat screen soon. Running an HDMI cable across the room to my laptop so I can play stuff off my laptop, then in a corner I am hooking up a speaker system. Is it plausible to remove a plugin faceplate and run wires up through my walls, into the attic, and out another faceplate to give a clean appearance? I'll modify a faceplate to allow the cables to come through. I am just not sure if this is something that can be done as I haven't even removed any of the faceplates yet.

 

It can be done although I don't know if I'd run HDMI and speaker wires in the same box as an electrical outlet. As far as just running wires in the walls and attic, it can certainly be done. I'd recommend getting a wire snake to fish wires from the attic down the walls.

Here are a couple things to be cautious about though:
1) I don't know how old your house is or what kind of construction was used but if there are nails sticking out inside the walls, when you pull wires past them, they can strip the wires.
2) If any of the walls are exterior or insulated interior walls, you might have a hard time fishing wires (especially if it's fiberglass).
3) You will probably have to drill a hole through the top of the wall to fish a wire down the wall.
4) Most speaker wire is not meant to be left exposed in an attic, you might want to think about some cheap wire loom to protect the wires since they are generally thin wires with out very much insulation.

Disclaimer, I haven't done this to my house yet but I figured I'd share what I plan to do when the time comes.

 

The easiest way to do this is find an existing outlet where there is a phone jack or TV cable jack. Preferrably an interior wall without insulation inside, but can be done if the existing cable runs between the insulation and inside wall.

Locate where the cable runs into the wall from the attic or crawlspace. Remove/disconnect the faceplate so you have the end of the cable free. Very securely tie/tape a sturdy string or small rope to the end of the cable, making sure the rope is longer than the height of the wall.

Go to the attic and pull the TV cable up and out of the wall (carefully, helps to have an assistant watching the other end) with the string still attached. Then securely attach the new wire you are running to the end and have the assistant carefull pull the string and the whole works back down.

If you need to add new outlet boxes for the wire you can get the ones with the flanges that are made for adding to an existing enclosed wall. Put them above/below/beside the existing cable outlet whatever is easier. You have to cut a small rectangular hole to install these add-in boxes anyway, so the hole can be used to assist access while running the wires up and down.

 

You can buy HDMI wall plates. http://www.homedepot.com/buy/ge-white-hdmi-wall-plate-87635.html#.UMkNEaVQakU

Put one by the tv, one in the corner.

 

True. And wall plates with speaker wire connections, network jacks or many other types of connections.

While you're at it, If you don't have one there already, you might want to add a network jack behind the TV stand (or maybe near the laptop in your case) with cable running to wherever your main router is located.

When I first tried streaming video over the wireless with a blu-ray player, it was too slow, freezing up a lot. Much faster and no problems with the player hard wired directly to the router.

I liked it so much, I went ahead and ran network jacks into a couple other rooms.