There's a short window in every new build when running cable is easy, fast and cheap: after the electrician's rough-in, before the insulation and drywall go up. Miss that window and adding the very same wires later means cutting holes, fishing cable through insulated walls, patching and repainting.
If you're pre-wiring a new home in Southeast Georgia — or you're about to sign with a builder — this is the checklist we use on our own rough-ins. Print this page, walk your floor plan with it, and take it to your next builder meeting. It's written so you can use it whether or not you ever call us.
Why Pre-Wire Before the Drywall Goes Up
With open studs, a cable run takes minutes: drill, pull, staple, label. After drywall, that same run becomes a small renovation. I'll be honest about what retrofit really involves, because we do plenty of it:
Fishing cable through an insulated exterior wall is slow, blind work. Attic runs in a Georgia summer happen in brutal heat, which limits how long anyone can safely work up there. Two-story homes sometimes have no clean path at all between floors without opening walls. And every hole we cut means patching, texture-matching and paint.
None of that is a reason to skip a retrofit you need — but it is the reason pre-wiring during construction is the best money-per-outcome decision in the whole low-voltage world. The labor is a fraction, and the result is cleaner.
The Room-by-Room Pre-Wire Checklist
Here's the baseline we recommend for a typical family home. Add or trim based on how you actually live.
Living room / family room
- TV location: two Cat6 runs plus one coax at mounting height — not outlet height.
- Conduit (smurf tube) from behind the TV down to where components will sit. Whatever cable the future invents, you can pull it through without opening the wall.
- Power at TV height — coordinate with the electrician so the mounted TV hides its own outlet.
Bedrooms
- One Cat6 + one coax at the likely TV wall in each bedroom.
- A Cat6 at the desk corner in any room that might become a study or gaming spot — teenagers find these rooms.
Home office
- Double Cat6 drops at the desk wall — minimum two, four if you work from home. Video calls, a desktop, a printer and a dock fill ports fast, and wired beats WiFi for all of them.
Exterior
- Camera points: one Cat6 to each corner of the house at soffit height, plus driveway and back-door views. Even if cameras come later, the wire waits patiently.
- Doorbell point: a run to the front door for a video doorbell.
- Porch or patio: a Cat6 for a future outdoor access point if you live outside half the year like most of us here.
The media panel
- Pick a central home for the structured panel — a closet, laundry or office wall where every run terminates. Not a hot attic corner.
- Power inside the panel for the modem, router and camera recorder.
- One Cat6 to a central hallway ceiling (each floor) for a WiFi access point — the single best thing you can do for whole-home coverage.
- Spare conduit from the panel to the attic and crawlspace for whatever comes next.
Speaker runs
- Living room surround: speaker wire to the four or five spots a future system would need, terminated in wall plates. Even if you start with a soundbar, the walls are ready.
- Porch or patio pair for outdoor audio, with a volume control location by the door.
Building in Southeast Georgia?
Send us your floor plan and we'll mark up a pre-wire design for free. KELV handles rough-in and trim-out and coordinates directly with your builder. Estimates are always free.
Call (236) 349-7751Working With Your Builder: Timing Is Everything
Low-voltage rough-in slots into the build after the electrical, plumbing and HVAC rough-ins and before insulation. That's the whole trick — but it only happens if the builder knows it's coming.
Raise it at contract stage, not framing stage. Ask your builder two questions: "When is your insulation date?" and "Who's doing low voltage?" If the answer to the second one is a shrug or "the electrician can drop a couple of lines," that's your cue to bring in a specialist. A good low-voltage contractor coordinates directly with the general contractor's schedule, gets in and out without slowing the build, and leaves every run labeled.
"Isn't Everything Wireless Now?"
Fair question — it comes up on almost every pre-wire consult. Your phone is wireless. Your tablet is wireless. So why fill the walls with cable?
Because the things that make wireless good are wired. WiFi access points deliver their best speed when they're fed by ethernet, not relaying to each other — we cover this in detail in our WiFi dead zones guide. Security cameras on a cable get power and data through one wire and never drop offline mid-recording. A 4K TV streams happier on ethernet than on the busiest end of your WiFi. Wireless is the last hop to the device in your hand; cable is the backbone that carries everything behind the scenes.
Nobody has ever told us they regretted running too much cable in a new build. Plenty of people have said the opposite.
What KELV's Rough-In Visit Looks Like
When you book our new-home pre-wiring service, here's how it goes. First we walk the plans with you — room by room, exactly like the checklist above — and agree on every drop location. Then we schedule the rough-in with your builder, run and label every cable, and photograph the open walls so you have a permanent record of where every wire lives. After paint, we come back for trim-out: wall plates, jacks, the structured panel, and testing on every single run.
You get a house where the network, TVs, cameras and speakers all have clean, invisible infrastructure from day one. Questions about your build? Call (236) 349-7751.