The smart home pre-wire checklist

For a new construction home of 6,000-8,000 square feet in Loch Lloyd or anywhere in the Kansas City metro, plan on roughly 40-70 Cat6A drops and three to five ceiling access-point positions. IntegrateIT is a Platinum-tier Control4 dealer and low-voltage trade partner in Overland Park, KS, working across Kansas City, Missouri and the Johnson County suburbs. The drop count comes from the room list rather than from square footage, and access points follow roughly one per 2,500 square feet plus a dedicated position for the walkout lower level and one outdoors. What follows is the actual checklist we mark up on a drawing set, room by room, with the reasoning for each item — because the value of this list is not the count, it is knowing which omissions are cheap to fix later and which are not. Call (913) 804-7575.

The one rule underneath every line of this list

The expensive part of a wire is the wall around it. Structured wiring installed at framing stage is inexpensive; the identical work retrofitted after drywall costs several times more in labor, because every run becomes fishing, patching, texture, paint and a conversation about how much ceiling comes down. That asymmetry is the whole argument for over-pulling now, and it is why the honest advice on nearly every item below is “more, and while you are there.”

It also sets the schedule. Low-voltage rough-in lands after framing inspection and after mechanical, electrical and plumbing rough-in, and before insulation and drywall — a window of typically 5 to 12 days of on-site work depending on the size of the house. Everything on this list has to be decided before that window opens.

The checklist, room by room

How the access-point count actually gets set

One radio per 2,500 square feet is the starting arithmetic and the building corrects it, usually upward. On a Johnson County new build the recurring corrections are predictable: foil-faced insulation and radiant barriers reflect radio as effectively as they reflect heat; a stone fireplace and its chase block cleanly rather than attenuating gently; a walkout lower level with poured concrete on three sides is a separate coverage problem from the main floor; and a commercial-style range wall or a wine room will move a coverage map more than anyone expects.

So on a 7,000 square foot house the arithmetic says three and the design usually lands at four or five, plus an exterior position at the patio or pool. Mark them on the reflected ceiling plan, get blocking placed while the framer is on site, and pull one Cat6A run to each. Wire every position you might plausibly want, even the ones you are unsure about — a run terminated into a blank plate costs almost nothing, and it is the only version of this decision that can be changed cheaply. Why the wired version matters so much is the subject of mesh Wi-Fi versus hardwired access points.

The four omissions that hurt most

• No power above the windows. Motorized shades are the most common phase-two purchase in this market and the most expensive thing to retrofit, because the work happens at the most visible plane in the room. Pull the power even if the shade decision is years away.
• No conduit out of the equipment closet. A sleeve up to the attic and a sleeve down to the lower level turn every future addition into a pull instead of a demolition. It is the single cheapest line item on the whole pre-wire.
• No back-cans for ceiling speakers. Retrofitting an enclosure into a finished ceiling is a patch, a texture match and a paint job for every speaker — and without one, sound bleeds into the room above.
• An equipment closet sized for today. Conditioned, ventilated, on its own circuit, and larger than the current gear list. An attic or an uninsulated garage is the wrong place for it in this climate. The full argument is on the rack build page.

Before the insulation goes in: photograph everything

Walk the house the day before insulation with a phone and shoot every wall, every ceiling and every mechanical run, room by room, with something in frame for scale. It takes ten minutes and it is the most valuable free thing a homeowner does during a build. Two years later, when somebody needs to know where a stud, a run or a junction actually sits, the answer is in the photo roll instead of behind a hole in the drywall.

On our side, the handover includes an as-built: the port map, VLAN assignments, IP scheme, equipment list and labeling scheme. Both ends of every run get labeled to one scheme so that the jack, the patch panel and the documentation agree — and the design is deliberately universal, so if you bring in a different integrator at trim-out, the pre-wire is theirs to pick up without renegotiating anything.

What drives the cost, and what it does not include

Three things move the number: the square footage and how many structures the scope covers — a whole-house pre-wire on a 6,000-10,000 square foot home, which is where most Loch Lloyd and Leawood custom builds land, is a different project from a foundational pre-wire on a smaller home or an estate spanning more than one structure — the drop and access-point count the room list actually calls for, and how much of the checklist above gets pulled. Pricing is fixed against a scope-of-work document measured from the architectural plans, not a square-footage rule of thumb, and the full driver breakdown is on the pre-wire cost guide.

None of that includes equipment. A pre-wire is cable, pathway, boxes, blocking, the panel and terminations — no displays, no speakers, no access points, no cameras, no processors, no programming. That is the trim-out phase, and it is quoted separately. The division is worth internalising early: the pre-wire decides what the house is capable of, and the equipment decides what it does the week you move in. Only the first one is hard to change.

— Daniel Alon, founder, IntegrateIT. Overland Park, KS. September 2026.