DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

(Read part 1, in which we shop for speakers and parts.)

I don’t think of myself as being particularly handy. I’ve done my share of furniture repair, painting, demolition, electrical work, plumbing, sheetrocking, and light carpentry, as have all homeowners with limited budgets. I think I’m competent at the basics, even though I’m always extremely (painfully) aware of the things I’ve done wrong, the things I could have done better, and, sometimes, the things I’m going to have to get someone else to re-do right away, i.e. before I reset the circuit breaker.

So why would I even attempt to hang speakers myself? In a nutshell, because our handyman is 6'5'' tall, 200+ lbs, and doesn’t strike me as particularly limber. I couldn’t picture him crawling around in my attic. Frankly I wasn’t even sure I would fit.

There’s a particular unpleasantness to squatting or, worse, laying on joists and breathing fiberglass dust. The light is bad. Maneuvering is tough. It’s hot. All in all it’s not the way I planned to spend my weekend. But the prospect of finishing this installation outweighed other considerations.

The left speaker would have to hang between studs. I planned to attach a piece of 2x4 between the studs (on the back side of the drywall, of course) so the speaker-mount screws would have something to bite into. I’m not an expert on load-bearing hardware, but I didn’t feel good about hanging a 20 lb. speaker at the end of a 4'' arm using plastic drywall anchors.

To install the 2x4, I had to get behind the wall where the speakers would hang. This seemed as if it would be easy, because there’s an access door into the attic close to where the speakers would go. But once I climbed up there I saw that the space was filled with ventilation pipes. I could just about squeeze my hand through the gap to touch the back of the drywall where the speaker would attach, but there was little hope of fitting tools in there.

The other side was worse… I couldn’t get there from the left side, so I went up through the kitchen and crawled across the living room ceiling. Due to the cathedral ceiling, the crawlspace is about a foot wide and ten feet long, and is interrupted by a ventilation fan which I’d somehow have to crawl over without putting my weight on it, lest I drop through the ceiling atop the fan housing and surf the assembly down the basement stairs.

I sensed that special flavor of futility that comes when you’re wedged into a place that took you 15 minutes to get to, only to realize that you can’t go any further and it will take ten minutes to back out. I became aware that what I’d planned to do was beyond my abilities, and even further, beyond my desire. I painstakingly backed out of the crawlspace. I consider it one of the few successes of the morning that I didn’t kick the wires off the HVAC unit’s valve controls in the process. Be grateful for the small things, I told myself, especially when that’s all you’ve got to be grateful for.

It was time for plan B: mount the speakers to the top of the wall cabinet instead.

Fishing the speaker wires behind the cabinet took some time. There are now three large fender washers and assorted scraps of fishing line stuck somewhere behind the cabinet — I was trying to drop a line from above, and it got caught the first three times. After much jiggling I managed to drop my line directly behind the hole I’d cut into the back wall of the cabinet. We tied the speaker cable to the top end of the fishing line and pulled it through: viola! as I like to say. We’d actually made progress.

After that, the rest of the task was simply driving screws. I drove a lot. My only criteria was to not punch through the top of the cabinet — I didn’t need to see screw points and splinters on display among the fancy vases and whatnot. I succeeded on this measure as well. I’ll refrain from publishing the number of screws whose heads I stripped with the Phillips bit in my drill… really, I mean it when I say I’m a software guy.

Here are images of the finished product: front view, side view.

Adjusting speaker position is tougher than I expected. After three corrections, the left speaker is still tipped clockwise. I guess it wants to stay that way. I’m trying to oblige (but there may be a 4th adjustment in the near future). Overall we’re really happy with the result, because, you know, now I get to resume shopping for an amplifier.