Bringing you up to speed…

So, my custom installation company – Custom Theater and Audio – landed the biggest job in our 18 year history, both in physical size of the home (21,500 square feet under roof on one floor sitting on 4 acres of property just back from the ocean) and in financial scope of the job. I decided to chronicle the project over the next several months, the decisions I made in system design, the proposal process, the prewire, trim out and installation.

A month ago I posted Part 1 of this saga where I discussed The Spec Out. If you missed that, I went over my thought process on coming up with the proposal for this job; how I tackled the size of the job and figured out the best way to handle audio/video distribution and control as well as my choices on selecting the system components.  

Once I had determined the essential design and layout of the system – which was greatly simplified and solved a lot of install and integration issues by deciding to go with localized “mini systems” in each of the living suites instead of trying to do everything from a centralized rack – I was able to start work on the proposal which ultimately came in at 18 pages not including the Lutron Homeworks proposal which we prepared separately. (More on this in part three...)

One of the questions that I received from my first post was, “Only 16 zones of whole house audio in a 25k house?” Actually, as big as the home is – and it is 21.5k not 25k – there really aren’t a lot of rooms; the rooms are just massive. For instance, the family room and kitchen alone are like 150% bigger than my entire house. Also, by breaking up the five bedrooms – bedroom suites and bathrooms – and family room and theater into their own systems – complete with surround sound – that removed potentially 12 zones from the house audio distribution. So, the owners will have no shortage of customized listening options per area.

Before presenting my proposal, I wanted to “wow” the builders and basically set them up to be blown away by my quote before they even saw it. Honestly, I was pretty confident about my chances of landing this job – in fact my business partner, Allen, kept hitting me with the Star Wars quote, “Your overconfidence is your weakness!” – and in my mind it was more a question of, “How good will the system be?” rather than “Will we or won’t we get this job?”

Click here to read the rest of Part 2 at Residential Systems...