Short answer: pre-wiring while the walls are open typically costs about half of what the identical wiring costs as a retrofit — and some runs that are trivial at framing become genuinely impractical after drywall. The exact quote moves with drop count, home size, and how much future-proofing you want, which is why we walk the plan and price it free.
Why the walls-open window matters
When a house is at the framing stage, running a wire is minutes of labor: drill, pull, staple, done. After drywall, texture, and paint, that same run means attic crawls, fished walls, patch-and-match — every drop gets slower and some become genuinely impractical, especially on slab-foundation two-stories. If you're building in Leander, Liberty Hill, or anywhere the growth is happening, the pre-wire window between electrical rough-in and insulation is measured in days. Call before insulation and everything about the project is cheaper and cleaner.
What a proper pre-wire includes
A builder's contract-minimum wiring is usually one cable outlet per bedroom and not much else. A real pre-wire package looks like this:
Two Cat6 drops to every TV location and the office (one for the TV, one spare — you will use it). Cat6 to each ceiling corner where a security camera will ever live, even if the cameras come later. Wired access-point locations on the ceiling — one per floor minimum — so your WiFi comes from where WiFi should come from, not a router in a media closet. Speaker pairs to the living room, patio, and media room. Conduit (smurf tube) from the panel to the attic and to the TV wall, which is cheap insurance for whatever cable standard exists in fifteen years. And a structured panel or small closet rack where all of it terminates, labeled.
The math against waiting
A pre-wire package at framing is measured in hours; the identical scope as a retrofit in the finished house is measured in days — fishing walls, cutting and patching, working around finished surfaces — and the labor difference lands on the invoice, typically doubling the cost of the same drops. We do plenty of retrofit cabling and we're glad to have the work, but we'll tell you plainly: the cheapest low-voltage dollars you'll ever spend are the ones spent before insulation.
What we need from you
Your floor plan and your builder's framing schedule — that's it. We coordinate directly with the GC, get in and out between trades, and hand your builder a clean rough-in that passes walkthrough. Get a free pre-wire quote with your plan and we'll mark it up with recommended drops and exact numbers, no obligation.