Anyway, I decided to add a 110v outlet, move the cable, add some blocking and rough in some speaker wire. So, with my trusty utility knife, I cut a (big) hole in the wall. "Oh," was Noel's reaction. "That's a big hole in the wall."
The first thing I did was add some horizontal blocking with 2"x6" boards. The metal hangers worked perfectly and went up easily with wood screws.
From there, I set about shutting off the breaker in the garage, testing the outlets to see if they were hot and then testing them again. Once I was confident they were not 'hot', I pulled out my handy-dandy wiring diagram that Greg from Lowe's drew for me and went to work wiring the additional outlet. The cable was easy to move as it did not require any additional wiring; just a junction box. I nailed in a third junction box to run the center channel speaker along with a future HDMI cable (if you are going to do this, don't forget to add a pull string to pull down through the wall).
That night, I measured out 30' pieces of speaker wire and labeled them with 'center', 'woofer', 'front left', and 'front right' on each end (with masking tape). The next day, I went up into the attick and drilled a couple of holes in the top plate of the wall to feed the wires down. The position was easy to find as I just traced the existing coaxial cable and drilled right next to it. I fed the wires down through the holes.
Next came the drywall and painting (a full 21 days later ... yes, Noel had to stare at that eyesore for three weeks, but she was very patient. That's why I love her). The drywall guy was in our house for about 90 minutes. After the mud dried, I gave it a light sanding and then painted it.
Overall cost, not including TV or mount, was about $180 (with $100 being the drywall labor, $40 for speaker wire and the rest was electrical wire and components).
Now what? Re-tiling the master bath?
