Help needed with simple multi room setup

[clueless]

Here is what I have.

Kitchen
Phoenix gold dual voice coil switchable 8 or 16 ohm speaker
wired to rotary volume control knob

Bedroom
Phoenix gold dual voice coil switchable 8 or 16 ohm speaker
wired to rotary volume control knob

Upstairs living room
Phoenix gold dual voice coil switchable 8 or 16 ohm speaker
no independent volume control

All need to be wired to a single stereo reciever in a central location. Just for listening to music around the house. It worked fine when we looked at the house but have never been able to get it hooked up to the reciever right since we have been here. If I plug more than one speaker into the reciever at a time it overheats and clicks off and on. I'm sure there is a way the speakers need to be wired together before being wired to the reciever but I cant figure it out for the life of me. I can do about anything else but I understand nothing about wiring speaker setups. Any help would be great.

 

[macddmac]

Hi and welcome to audioholics forum, We will need a bit more information before we can proceed..
First, how many sets of speakers are there?
Second, How do you wire them to your receiver?
Usually, you wire Multiple pairs of speakers to a speaker selector that impedance matches those speaker sets so that they don't present an Unduly high ohm (resistance)load to the receiver.
Typically, separate speaker sets are controlled by their own volume controller in the room that they're located.
Some of these volume controllers are impedance matched already, however you still need a speaker selector if you have more than two sets for a standard receiver to control those speakers.
If you have several sets of speakers, it may make sense to use a multichannel amplifier to control each individual zone.
Cheers, Mac