It was shortly before the plastering (the point of no return) that we made the one big change that was likely to massively annoy the builders. With the boxes stacking up that were going to sit below the TV (and my wife not being a huge fan of this), we decided to redo the cabling (!) and have all the speaker cable run back to the storage room behind the rear wall of the TV room (so the space behind the speaker cutouts). As we had a long HDMI and duct in the ceiling already that ran from the TV to the rear of the room (where the rack would go), we already had a connection between the back of the TV and the storage room (as the projector point was at the top of the rear wall). Here's a look at that storage room with all the cabling running in:
The decision to move everything bar the TV into another room had one major knock on effect, it meant we had to find a universal remote or some sort of relay to control the TV etc. We decided to go with a Control 4 remote, because I just wanted this to be as seamless as possible for the family to use.
As we were refurbing the whole house, I decided to stick a load of CAT6 everywhere. Every room in the house now has 1-2 sockets. For the TV room, I have also run loads - I have 4 sockets running into the storage room above, I also have two network sockets below the TV and one below the windows (where I will put my wifi transmitter, I use eero for home wifi). So basically overkill.
The ethernet all runs back to one cabinet on the ground floor, which looked like this:
And that has now transformed into this (still not quite finished but you get the idea):
I'm particularly happy with this (was actually suggested by my electrician), as we've run BT and virgin sockets into this cabinet. We've also run a duct from this cabinet out to the street, so if ever we get a full fiber upgrade on our road (probably in the next 5 years or so?) then we can run the fiber through the duct and straight into the cabinet, which is kinda cool.
While we have 7 runs of ethernet going down to the various areas of the TV and storage room, we will put a separate switch in the rack that will host the AV equipment.