Behind the walls

Remember this picture from The Pillow Zoo?

In November, Bad Dad helped me mount a television on a column.  You can see it in the mirror.  The two columns looked like this mid-construction.  If you blow it up the picture, you can see the black coaxial cables, blue Cat 6 and white electricity lines snaking through the soffits and columns.

In a concrete building like this, you can't run the electricity through the floors and ceilings.  We had to really think through where we wanted infrastructure, and how to route it.

My contractor asked me where I wanted to put the TV.  I replied that I didn't have one, but might like a wall-mounted one on the column on the right, which contains one of the four support posts in my condo.  They built out the R column to match the size of the L column, which contains the HVAC water pipes and fan.

They knew that you can't hang TVs off an aluminum studs, so they faced the Al studs with wooden 2x4s.  They also put wooden boards between the Al studs in the kitchen soffit, so I can mount pot racks.  I didn't have the experience to know these things, but I'm glad that I worked with people who were paying attention to these details during construction.

Do you want to see more photos of how we built infrastructure behind the walls?