Bachelor's Guide to Improvised Speaker Cable Installation

So you've got this supremely awesome home theater setup, but unfortunately you didn't spring for the fancy-pants wireless speakers that they show in catalogs like Crutchfield and probably SkyMall. Perhaps the whole routine of driving your visitors to triage after they constantly get knocked out by tripping on the loose wires and hitting their head on the corner of the eight-dollar end table you got from a yard sale is getting old. It's time to string them up. I'm talking about the speaker wires there.

Even more unfortunately, you're lacking basic tools, since you're a bachelor and so, by extension, nobody is nagging expecting you to fix anything. As with all things single-life, from igniting rolled-up sheets of printer paper on the stove and then rushing outside with it to light your grill to putting an ancient throw rug over a window to keep the glare from hitting your two-thousand-dollar HDTV, it's all about improvisation.

Gather the following materials that are commonly close at hand for the average bachelor:

1. Keyring
2. Little brass hooky screws that kind of look like a question mark, only without the dot (as many as you think you'll need)
3. Nail (just one)
4. Big-ass combat knife with a solid butt
5. Some kind of thing to stand on (not pictured, unless you are going to use a desk, in which case my own is pictured as an example desk)



The steps for installing the hooky screws are just as easy to get as the materials themselves.

1. Move your thing to stand on to the place where you need to stand on it.
2. Stand on the thing with your other objects in your hands.
3. With the butt of the knife, tap the nail into the ceiling to make a guiding hole for the hooky screws.
4. Pull the nail back out again. I hope you have fingernails you don't mind messing up (if you actually are a bachelor, this is always the case). If you don't have fingernails or are not a bachelor, use the pinching power of the keyring to pull the nail out. Also, if you do it this way, you can totally pretend it's a grenade and you're pulling the pin on it.
5. Hand-twist that hooky screw into the guiding hole but good.
6. Rest the speaker cable in the crook o' the hook.
7. Move on down the line and go back to step one.

Before long, you'll have a veritable aqueduct through which your speaker cable passes, like so.



Yeah, those are where the hooky screws went in my particular case.

At the end, your cable will be clear of obstructing people and even decorations, as seen here descending tastefully to the speaker on the far side of your handsome portrait hanging over the mantle of Stephen Colbert standing in front of a portrait of himself hanging over the mantle.



Most of the more sophisticated wall-mounting hardware will allow for the speaker cable if both happen to attach to the speaker in the back. If they don't, just make use of your handy Bachelor Powers of Improvisation™ and bypass threading it through the mounts entirely, as I did.



As for the mounting system itself, well... that was just more BPoI™ on my part. Mounting tape + duct tape = no ugly nail holes that the landlord is yelling at me to spackle over come eviction time.

And so, rock on with your new, almost-so-organized-people-might-think-someone-else-put-you-up-to-it cable job!