Right.

What you are describing is called a two-zone system, where the 5.1 or 6.1 or 17.1 is one zone, and the whole rest of the house is the other zone.

You can play different things in the two zones. Note from the description that if you choose something for the second zone's living room speakers, that same thing plays in the second zone's master bedroom speakers.

Consider using no speaker switcher. A speaker switcher gives you the ability to turn off individual pairs of speakers. I install systems, and people always turn on all the rooms and then never go back to the speaker switcher.

If you have a switcher and you are in a room that is turned off, you have to go back to the switcher to turn it back on. If it were on all the time and you turned it off by just lowering the volume to zero on a volume control in the room, life would be that little bit easier.

Incidentally, when some speakers are turned off, others get a larger percentage of the power, so they can play louder. But does that matter in real life?

So, instead, use Niles impedance matching volume controls (or any that allow various impedance settings; I love Sonance but they do not have these). You set jumpers inside the controls so each pair of speakers takes 1/8, or 1/4 or 1/2 of the amp's power.

You could also run, say, four pairs of speakers at different power levels by routing 1/2 the power to the outdoor speakers (they lose more sound to the outdoors), then 1/4 the power to the master bedroom, then 1/8 the power to the master bath and 1/8 the power to the kitchen...see? The smaller rooms need less power, and the above setup uses 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/8 = 1 times the power. The volume control instructions do not express impedance matching this way, but it actually does work this way.