Hi, I just purchased my first home... it's a 1930's fixer upper. two floors with a decent sized attic I plan to turn into a home theater (eventually).

Right now, i have the walls and ceiling open in the middle of the second floor. This pretty much gives me access to run wire wherever i need it in the house, at least to the ceiling locations for the first floor.

I am getting close to closing up the walls for drywalling when i realized how much i loved tinkering with home automation in my previous apartments and houses i've rented. I figure now is definately the time to run wires for home automation however i'm not sure of what i need.

Things i'd eventually like to accomplish are:

1. whole house audio
2. voice control (if it works well)
3. lighting control
4. serving of audio/video to all/most rooms (i have a server with a bunch of avi, divx, xvid etc... that i would like to be fed to bedrooms, living room, kitchen and attic.
5. anything important i'm missing? Right now my house doesn't have any sort of central heating/air conditioning (i live in oregon so we can get by with in wall heaters) however, thats something that may change in the future if i get rich.

Currently, I have run cat5 and coax to the desired rooms but am definately over looking things. the access is great to most of the backs of the walls upstairs (storage areas are unfinished) so the main thing is getting everything through the upstairs landing... from there i can run them through the second story floor to the downstairs, or to the bedrooms when/as i see fit.

One thing i think i'm definately forgetting is speaker wire... what is a good guage to run for inwall speakers? I'm not looking to spend a lot of money for inwalls as it's just ambient music, but on the same hand i want something that sounds decent. (thats a whole other thread though). is 14ga big enough? or do i have to go down lower? Should i run 14/4 and then split it when i get to the room?

I would love to hear some thoughts on this. Many thanks in advance

it might not help, but it doesn't hurt, so here's a very very rough floor plan of my house (not to scale obviously)

http://www.marathonation.com/house.jpg

14/4 for home audio should be plenty. Just make sure it is rated for in wall. The best thing to do would be to run 14/4 to a volume control and run 14/2 to the speaker location from the volume controls. That way you can control the audio in different rooms and many volume controls are set up to adjust impedence for multiple sets of speakers.

Just my thoughts. Is how I ran mine.

Caveat: I'm no expert and only researching right now. That said, I've seen a lot of references to using CAT5 for volume control. I would research different home automation options at the basic level to get a broader idea of possibilities (smarthome.com, etc.).

Most of the standard volume controls I have seen use speaker wire to deliver the sound(Smarthome, Jobsite, Jamo, Xantech etc...). There may be an option of using cat 5 for automation purposes. Seems to me that cat 5 is not very well suited for sound transmission across distances. Not much shielding or wire.

I would drop as much as you can. I ran 3 lines of RG6 and 2 CAT5 lines, and now I wishing I did twice that.

Once you get going on using the wires, there's no stopping.