i know you will all say put in the cat 5 etc etc, however my priority is getting a house. each wire i add is $100 and i know many will say it will be worth it but i am just wiring the surrounds in wall and that is it.
coax for cable in each room, however i have never had direct tv. if i get direct tv and they put the satellite on my roof how does the satellite connect to the direct tv receiver? (what type of wire gets run into the house and do they have to drill into my house?
There are multiple wires that run from the satellite dish to the house. Typically I would recommend that you pick a 'central' location in your home from which to distribute your audio, video, phone, and ethernet wiring. I'm not talking about a 2' x 3' box on the wall, I'm talking about a small room which you can actually give the gear a bit of space and have room to grow.
If you can't get the wiring done now, then, as mentioned, run some conduit. At $100 for ONE piece of conduit, then you can run all of your phone, cable, and ethernet later on. Pick 10 rooms, run one piece of conduit to each (1" minimum!) and for $1,000 you get your home setup so you can put 2, 4, or 10 wires to each room as YOU want to. It may sound kind of weird, but it really does open up your possibilities as the single wire run is something they are gouging you on. A good wire technician can run 2 pieces of CAT-5 and 2 pieces of coaxial cable to any single room in under an hour rather easily. I ran about 50 wires in my home in about 10 hours. A single day! That's $5,000 I would have paid (I paid less) to your builder! But, I only really wired 12 rooms and I could have even avoided wiring a few rooms because I ran conduit from basement to attic (two 2" pieces). Really, if you plan things carefully, but quickly, you can get conduit yourself and have them install it. DEMAND IT! Your home, your rules, and you are paying them to do it, but you want that future proofing that only conduit can offer.
Back to your question, a single piece of coaxial cable can feed a single tuner satellite box, but DVR satellite boxes require two pieces of coax because they have two tuners inside and one piece of coax feeds each tuner. From outside, depending on how many satellite receivers you have in the house you may have as many as four (or more?) pieces that need to go from the dish to inside your home. So, if you just run some conduit to your central location to the outside entry point to your home, you can add as many pieces of coaxial cable (typically RG-6 quad shield) that you need to.
Really - you can add 1,000 feet of coax, 1,000 feet of cat-5 and some speakers to each room (1,000 feet) for about $300 in cable you buy online! All you have to do is avoid the insane 'per cable' costs they try to rack you with and get some conduit in place to really give yourself 'future proof'.
http://www.homenetworksinc.com/proddetail.asp?prod=RGC-001
http://www.smarthome.com
About halfway down is a good read on the subject...
http://www.jeffbollinger.net/?cat=25
Also, I can't say this enough: TAKE PHOTOS! Go through your home methodically and take photos of the walls before insulation goes in! You literally can't take enough photos and you need to take pictures of everything that you can in a room. The ceilings are especially important as you may find yourself wanting to add recessed lighting at some point (which is also a great way to add some extra wiring in a room.
Simply put, this is a very unique time, and I realize that the home itself is a huge expense, but you actually CAN add the granite countertops after you move in. You can't run these wires at any other point of the process without a great deal of expense.
If it costs $3,000 for a granite countertop upgrade, you likely could do it later for the same $3,000. If it costs $3,000 for a bunch of wiring and conduit runs, it would cost (not joking) upwards of $10,000 later, not including the expense of drywall repair and painting.
