house refurbishment help

[jayjayr]

hi,

i've just started a major refurbishment of my new house (well maisonette, but in london that's as close to a house as i will probably ever get...)

this involves completely re-wiring, re-plumbing, re-plastering etc. and i've just realised (hopefully in the nick of time) that running cabling for a home multi room a/v set up would make sense now, even if i can't afford all the gear by the end of the build!

so i would really appreciate any advice on what cables i should be running so that i'm as future proofed as possible.

i'm thinking i should run cat5 & co axial cable (how many of each though?) to every room from the lounge (3 bedrooms upstairs, kitchen & study downstairs) and also run some speaker cable in the walls of each room to sensible points.

i would like to have my sky+ box (possibly hd in the future), freeview (for an alternative tv signal), dvd, cd player & radio all connected to some sort of distribution box that would then send the signals by those cables to the necessary rooms and people in those rooms could also control those a/v sources.

is that cabling right? i assume the cat5 does the audio and the co axial the video? should i be running anything else?

i've tried to look at potential different systems now but am more confused than ever. i started looking at the cambridge incognito which seemed like a decent system that i could understand, but then read some posts on here where people said that a-bus systems sounds a bit lame. any thoughts on something better (but not too much more expensive!) that will do what i want? i'd like to get it right now so i'm not chasing walls just after the paint has dried...

thanks a lot for your help!
jj