I spent the better part of Sunday last installing new cable jacks in our house. I realize that in the grand scheme of things, having cable outlets in the rooms we want it in shouldn’t be a huge priority - but we were both a little tired of having our cable running out of the floor, around in an arc, up the stairs, and into the office in a nasty snarl of trip-ready ugliness.

The cable comes into our living room via a sizable hole in the wall in 2 lines. Why two? Who knows. This place is all messed up. Before Sunday, one of these lines ran out of the wall and snaked across the living room floor to our TV, and the other one ran through a hole in the floor into the basement, then back up through a further hole in the floor at the bottom of the stairs, then up them in the trip-ready line of death I mentioned earlier.

I started by cleaning this arrangement up a bit by drilling a new hole and feeding all the cable into the basement. It’s not perfect, I know, but it’s a lot better than it was before. Here’s a nice dramatic shot of the cables coming into the basement from above.

My first goal was to get a jack positioned on the wall behind the television, right next to the cold-air return vent. I figured the best way to attack the wall was from behind - in the basement stairwell - thereby avoiding messing up the living room wall any more that I had to. It was a good idea.

Upon cutting my first hole in the wall, I wound up discovering that feeding the cable through there would lead nowhere useful. After inserting the end of the cable into the only available space that seemed to lead to the basement, I found that it was impossible to locate once down there. After much searching and figuring out of what things were where, I wound up having to cut 2 more holes in the wall, drill through the stud, and feed it behind the mysterious basement ductwork and out into the light were it could join it’s other cably friends and give us all the warming glow of TV.

A quick resize of the hole in the living room later, and I was able to insert the mounting plate and hook up the face panel and we were in business! It worked and everything!

The process was repeated with similar aplomb for the jacks in the office and spare bedroom, which I decided would be directly opposite each other on the shared wall between those two rooms. This way I only had to run one cable and put a splitter right behind the plates in the wall to get signal to both jacks. This was also a good idea as I made a giant mess of the kitchen walls under the office trying to fish the cable down to the basement. It’s okay though - we have a lot of patching to do in there anyway.

When all was said and done, we were left with several more holes in the walls to patch, a lack of (visible) coaxial cable running all over our house and three shiny new cable jacks in our walls.

So what did I learn from all this? Finding your way around inside walls that you can’t see into is harder that I thought it would be. I’m in the process of adding a fourth jack in the kitchen, but it’s going much faster based on the lessons learned from this foray into my walls.

-Ted.