It was just a weird situation because the job had dragged on for so long and changed so much. I taped up the whole wall for a few reasons:
- If you look back at the photo of the framing, it's a complex wall where hardly any of the framing is standard 16" on center and there's also a lot of additional vertical 4x4 plus a lot of blocking. There's also an electrical panel in there with 2" conduit for the high voltage feed, some romex and a bunch of security wiring behind the blocking.
- It wasn't clear at first if the TV would be centered on the wall or offset one way or the other based on furniture. I only had a couple full width bays that could accommodate the sub woofer and wall box so had to sort out where it was possible to place the TV and then coordinate with the designer for final placement.
- If it hadn't worked out to hide the sub woofer behind the TV, the sub would have been placed low on the wall to the left of the TV, so marking out those stud locations was also important so I had a fall back plan.
In the end it worked out well... besides the cut in's for sub and wall box, I only had to make a single 3" hole up high on the wall to help guide the 1.25" conduit through the horizontal blocking.
