A built-in media wall lives or dies on what happens before the joinery goes up. Get the sockets and data points in the right places at first fix and the finished wall has no visible cabling at all; miss them and you are left with a trailing lead down the front of a very expensive piece of carpentry.
Before
The room started with a single socket on an otherwise bare wall — enough for a lamp, nowhere near enough for a television, a soundbar, a games console and a router. Everything was going to have to run off an extension lead, in full view.
First fix, before the joinery
New socket outlets and data points were run up the wall and positioned against the joiner’s drawings rather than guessed at, so each one lands inside a cupboard or behind the screen. Working at this stage meant chasing into a bare wall — quick, clean, and made good before anything was built over it.
Finished
With the unit built, every outlet sits concealed behind the media wall. The television, the AV kit and the network gear all plug in out of sight, with nothing running down the face of the wall and no extension lead anywhere. Tested and certified on completion.
The lesson worth taking from this one: if you are having a media wall built, get the electrician in before the carpenter, not after.
