Hiding TV and Speaker Wire

My latest project is normally my first post-move project, but I started this one late because I wanted to do it just right. Normally when I move to a place, I setup the TV and stereo first. Forget unpacking clothes, forget unpacking pots and pans (besides microwave stuff), and you can even forget unpacking the computer. I wanted to have that TV and stereo setup so it made the rest of the unpacking easier to stand. In the past, I was always moving into an apartment or condo, and I could never actually hide wires properly (running them into the basement or ceiling). So, I knew it was a quick setup. I knew this one would be a bit more complicated.

This picture (which Jen doesn't want me to post because she thinks it looks like we don't clean up after ourselves, but which I think is a good "before" picture) shows how the room looked after I mounted the TV on the wall. Notice the cable coming from the old TV nook, the modem in the lower left corner with phone and internet wires running to the TV stand, and the speaker wire near the fireplace running to the surround sound speakers. It not only looked bad, but it also wasn't too safe. After all, Jen and I are both pretty clumsy. Here's how it looked when facing the TV. It doesn't look too badly for an apartment setup, and could be improved with a few of those plastic cable tubes that also run down the wall, but that wouldn't require me to buy a lot of tools.
Last Saturday, I sat down with a pen and paper, staring at this mess. I came up with a plan and a shopping list. The plan was to cut one hole in the wall for each of the speakers, one behind the TV and one behind the entertainment center to run the HDMI cable, another behind the TV for power (it's against pretty much every code to run a power cord thru the wall, meaning insurance won't cover you if you burn down your house because of it), and another behind the entertainment center for the cable, phone, and internet connections (for the potential future project of wiring the house for internet). In order to aid future wiring projects, the plan was to put conduit into the walls between each of the holes. I wanted each of the holes to be clean, so I wanted to make sure each was covered by a nice wall plate. I had also planned to run the TV outlet off of the existing outlet behind the entertainment center.

So, off I went to the hardware stores with this shopping list, armed with gift cards from Lowes and Home Depot:
1. A punch saw.
2. 5 wall plates and connections for the speakers.
3. 1 wall plate for the new outlet.
4. 1 new outlet.
5. 1 outlet box.
6. Conduit and wires.
7. 7 boxes for the speaker and TV wires.
8. 1 box and wall plate for the cable, phone, and internet wires.
9. Snaking wire.
10. Wire cutters.
11. Conduit.
12. 100' of speaker wire.
13. 25' of cable.
14. 25' of phone wire.
15. Wire staples.
16. Cable endings and barrels.

I went to Lowes first because we had a gift card from our wedding that we found when we unpacked (there wasn't a Lowes in the city, but there's one within about 5 miles of us). I wasn't sure if the gift card would work, but it did. While there, I learned that there are basically two types of boxes that you can buy. There are ones for "new work" and ones for "old work". The former are to be used when you don't have drywall up, so I needed the "old work" ones. I also learned that they have some for things like outlets and switches and some for things like phone and internet wire. The latter are considered "low voltage". In this picture, you can see the low voltage ones that are going behind the entertainment center. The one on the right is the one of which I needed 7. You may also notice that the one on the right doesn't go very far into the wall. That's because it's the "old work" type that doesn't have to be nailed to wall stud (it's hard to fit a hammer into the wall to do so), rather it anchors itself to the wall. I bought a lot of stuff at Lowes using the one gift card, then went to Home Depot to buy the speaker and phone wire, the speaker connections, and the flexible drill bit. There, I realized that the speaker connections I wanted didn't require the face plates I bought at Lowes, so I have something to return there. I hate to admit it, but I was shopping for about 2 hours. A lot of my time was spent trying to figure out which types of outlet boxes I needed, and also how to secure the conduit.

I didn't get started on the project until Sunday.

My first task was to hook up the phone line. We have a phone outlet on a half-wall to our right when we face the TV. I took the panel off the wall to try to figure out how the wire was making its way there (I couldn't see it from the basement). I still don't know how it's getting there, but I decided to just drill through to the basement. It also meant I got to try out the flexible drill bit, which meant it was power tool time. I was a bit nervous to use it, but it's pretty cool. It's 50" long and is just flexible enough to allow one to put it into a hole in the wall then bend it down to cut through the 2x4 at the base of the wall and the subfloor. It worked like a charm for that hole that's 10" off the ground, but I would eventually have problems with other holes. After the drilling was done, I stripped the phone wire, connected the 4 wires to the existing outlet, fed the snaking wire up from the basement, hooded the phone wire to it, then pulled the slack down into the basement. With the wire in the basement, it was time to staple the wires to the floor joists so it wouldn't hang down (hindering the future man cave). I ran it over to the area below the TV.

Next, I used the punch saw to cut the hole that you see on the left side of the above picture. I also used the flexible drill bit again. I fed some conduit up into the hole. You can see it in this picture (the middle hole with the white (phone) wire). I then fed the snaking wire down from above and pulled the phone wire up and hooked it up to the outlet, which I left dangling because I still had to hook up the satellite cable. That was next. I already had a signal running into the basement, so I just had to put an ending and barrel on it. Then, I connected the new cable to it and stapled it to the ceiling (ala the phone wire, but don't kink cable!). I ran it up into the conduit already containing the phone line and hooked it up to the outlet. One hole was complete (the internet project is one for another year).

The next step was to wire up the outlet. I knew this was going to be the tough (and dangerous) part. First I turned off the circuit for the existing outlet. I used the surge suppressor (you can see it sitting on the entertainment center in the first and second pictures) to confirm that I had turned off the correct circuit (green light = circuit has power, no light = safe to work). It's a good thing I did so, because it was on a combined circuit for the family and laundry room, not the one labeled family room. That was nice because I could work with the light on. I cut the hole in a spot that would be covered by the TV, connected the conduit to side of it (tip: don't put it on the back if you have a room on the other side of the wall), unhooked the face plate and lower outlet, and punched a hole for the new conduit. At this point, I wasn't sure how I was going to get the conduit to hook up. I ended up using the snaking wire, feeding it from the existing outlet up to the new one. Then I ran the conduit down onto the snaking wire so its end would end up just outside the new hole in the existing outlet box. I'm sure there's a proper tool for this, but I used an angled allen wrench that I fed up into the conduit (next to the snaking wire) to pull it into place. This took a lot of finagling and swearing to pull off but eventually it snapped into place. With the conduit in place, I ran the black and white wires from the new box down to the existing one. I hooked up black to black and white to white. Then, I connected the new outlet to the wires, hooked up my test surge suppressor, and turned on the circuit to make sure it worked. It did. I turned the circuit back off, anchored the box to the wall, screwed the outlet into the box, and put on the face plate. From here on out, everything would be low voltage.

I cut holes out from behind each of the existing speakers, from behind the TV, and from behind the entertainment center. With one hole, I came pretty close to cutting the drain pipe for the clothes washer, and another was close to conduit for some other wiring. Luckily Libertyville requires that all electrical flow through conduit, so it would have been practically impossible to cut through it with a punch saw. If you're trying this yourself, you might want to cut power before cutting holes or drilling.

I then anchored the low voltage boxes to the wall and drilled the necessary holes (you can see them in the 4th picture). These were a bit more difficult because the flexible bit wasn't long enough to drill from above, but I was able to drill from below. The hard part was finding the snaking wire (that I was feeding in from below) among the insulation. With a little patience, I was eventually able to get them all wired through. Then I used the wire strippers to connect the speaker wire to their face plates. Here's the end result of that. It looks a lot better than the wire running down the wall. In this picture, you can also see the new power outlet and my "test" device. With the speakers on the wall and the TV back on the wall, I just had to hook up the components, clean up some drywall and wire endings, and rearrange the furniture.

Here's the final result. My next project is to paint so the contractor can come in to install our new kitchen appliances. I was going to try closing in the old TV hole, but the contractor said I'd only be saving myself a couple hundred bucks. I'd rather use that money to buy time to paint.

Three random projects

I haven't started on the floors yet. It's basically the "Everest" of projects that I have remaining, and it's not easy to just dive into it. So, I've been trying to tackle a few minor projects before I get to that one.

Door adjustments.

Our carpet was a bit longer than the old carpet, and some of the doors were dragging on the top of the carpet. We were worried that it would gradually "shave" the carpet and make our floors look like architectural drawings.

So, I consulted my friend Google, and found this article. It worked really well with one exception. The people that designed my saw didn't really anticipate this application. The motor and the tab to adjust the depth of the cut were both too low to allow me to use a 1" piece of wood to guide the saw. Luckily, there is about 1 inch to the right of the saw that I was able to place against my guide board. It may not have meant for the most perpendicular of cuts, but for the bottom of a door, nobody is going to notice. I ended up buying the saw horses, clamps, and a level for the job. I didn't really end up needing the level for "leveling" purposes, but it came in handy as a straight edge. I had 16 doors (including closets) to do, and here was my procedure.

1. Measure the cut. To do this, I laid down on the ground, dug thru to carpet until I could feel its base, then stuck a measuring tape in. I ended up measuring each side of the door so it was 7/8" above the base. That meant the door just barely brushed the tallest strands of carpet.
2. Pop the door off of the hinges. This involved a hammer and a screwdriver. Just put the screwdriver on the bottom of the hinge, tap a few times with the hammer, and the pin comes out pretty easily. I learned after the first door to pickup the pins with a paper towel so I didn't grease on the door while I carried it downstairs.
3. Carry the door downstairs. Out of 16 round trips, I only hit the wall twice. We have to paint downstairs soon, so I'll just touch up when we do that. It helped that we have hollow doors.
4. Line the straight edge up with the two measurement marks and clamp it in place.
5. Score a line with the carpet knife (this avoids splintering).
6. Move the straight edge so it is 1" from the score line.
7. Put masking tape over the score line (further avoids splintering).
8. While wearing eye protection, cut with the circular saw. After a few doors, I figured out that about 6 inches into the cut, the saw would catch because of the "protector door" (no clue what it's called) catching on the bottom edge of the door. I fixed that moving forward by holding it up when I started the cut. Oh, a few doors had brad nails in the bottom of them. For all but one nail, the saw handled them with little trouble and a few sparks. One was actually ripped out of the door and I found it on the other side of the room. It was a "why you use eye protection 101" lesson. The face (and nose) full of sawdust is another reason to think safety first.
9. Remove the tape and sand the edges to remove any splinters.
10. Put the shop vac to work to avoid vacuuming upstairs.
11. Carry the door upstairs.
12. Line it up with the hinges and put the pins back in.
13. Enjoy your freely swinging door.
14. Repeat 15 more times (you get in a groove after a while).

Hang the family room light

We used to have a fan and a standing IKEA light in our family room. It was always pretty dark in there so we ordered a new one. It showed up a few weeks ago, and was just a big box in said family room. I have hung lights before so I was confident in the electrical side of the work. I even laughed at the warning in the box that it should be installed by a professional electrician. In hindsight, I wish I had someone else do it, but it didn't require an electrician. It required someone with superhuman strength and a lot of patience. I got buy without either of them, but I was in a lot of pain the next day. A lot of the work involved preparing the thing to be hung. It took me a solid hour to put it all together. Then I hung it from some temporary screws that they provided. They allowed the whole light to hang about 8" below the ceiling while you did the wiring. The directions had suggested that you do this while hooking up the cables, but that would have been insane. Once I got the wiring done, I flipped the circuit back on just to make sure it worked. It did. Jen thought it looked great, but asked if the wires were supposed to look like they did. I told her that I wasn't done yet, but only have one more thing to do. MAN. That one thing was a doozie. I first tried removing the four temporary screws, then while holding the whole light in my left arm, guide it into the 4 bolts with my right, then put a nut on the end of one of the bolts. I quickly realized that would work. So, I struggled to put the 4 temporary screws back on, then had to figure something out. I realized that I needed something to support the light while I worked to secure it to the ceiling. If I wasn't going to be able to secure it, I needed somewhere to put the light without dropping it or unhooking the wiring (oh, I had the circuit back off at this point). So, I ended up building a support out of the kitchen table, the saw horses I used for the doors, and the boxes and styrofoam in which the light arrived. It wasn't the sturdiest of structures, but it only had to hold up for a half hour or so. Now armed with a resting place for the light, I employed the services of my lovely assistant Jen. Each of us on our own ladder, Jen's job was to put the nut on the bolt after I put the light up through them. It took us a few tries before we realized that we couldn't even get the nuts through the 4 holes. So, I put two of the temporary screws back on to guide things. That worked, and Jen was able to put two nuts on two bolts. (Yes I'm giggling now because of how many times I'm using the word "nuts".) I was able to handle the rest, and finally secured our new light to the ceiling. In hindsight, I would have put the nuts on the temporary bolts, gradually raised the whole thing, eventually removing one temporary screw at a time. Maybe next light. Probably not though. We've had to live with a weird smell from the light for a bit, but the directions said that would happen. Our new light looks great though, and we now have plenty of light in our family room.

Hang the TV

You may remember that we don't like the TV cubby in our fireplace. We just don't think it is the best way to showcase a fireplace. It'll just draw attention away from the rest of the room, and we just don't like that. So, we bought a kit to hang our TV on the wall. I worked on it last night. It was pretty fun to do, especially since I was able to live out my childhood dreams of writing on the wall. Because we hadn't painted yet, I was drawing all over the wall to show myself and Jen what it would look like when completed. We agreed on the final outcome, then I started the hanging process. About 5 minutes in, I realized that the bracket wouldn't center too well on the wall studs. So, we moved the whole drawing about 6" to the right. If you come over and mention that the TV isn't centered on the wall, please just notice that it's still on the wall and level, not on the ground or leaning to the left. I ended up putting the bracket on the wall, but wished I could break out the ratchet set we're giving Dave for Christmas. I ended up screwing 4 bolts into the studs with a lock wrench. I put the other brackets on the back of the TV, and only broke one screw in the process. I then hung the TV on the wall. It was pretty easy. Had I not been drawing all over the wall, I would have likely finished in a half-hour. I then hung our speakers on the wall. At this point, everything is hooked up, but the wires are exposed. My next project will be to hide them. The tricky part is going to be the power for the TV. It goes against pretty much every code to run a power cord through a wall. So, I have some research to do. I'm hoping that I'm going to be able to run the wires through the wall and floor without having to cut any drywall except for holes. We'll see though. If I have to, it won't be too bad because my next project will be to cover the hole in the fireplace and hang a new mantle. That'll require drywall for sure, and I bet I'll have some left over.

That's it for now. I'll post a picture of the whole room when we're done. Have a Merry Christmas everyone, and if I don't do anything by then, have a Happy New Year too!

Our hardwood floors have arrived!

Our hardwood floors have arrived. They came via freight in a giant semi. I received a call on Thursday saying they'd show up today (Monday) or tomorrow, and they'd tell me Friday which it would be. I hadn't received a call as of this morning, and was planning to call on my way to work. Good thing I didn't wait because the guy I talked to said they cleared customs in Canada (Port Huron) this morning. I guess I had to work from home then. The truck arrived around 12:30, and the driver reiterated that he couldn't do any work outside of the trailer. That meant he'd unload the boxes from the palette, and I'd carry them into the house. The fact that they came via semi meant that he had to park in the road and I had to carry them all the way up the driveway. Oh, it happened to snow and freeze our driveway yesterday. I sure am glad they didn't deliver yesterday when it was 35 degrees warmer and 45 degrees outside. After trip number 15 of carrying one 52.5lb box at a time, I really didn't feel the cold though. After trip number 50, I could barely fell anything in my right hand. After trip 80, I was glad to have only one trip left. Then the driver carried the last two boxes in on his shoulder. What a glory whore. The picture above is just less than half of them.

From what I've read, I'm not supposed to install them for 3-4 days so they can get acclimated to the humidity of the house. It's a good thing, because I think it'll take that long before I'm able to feed myself again. Well, I'm off to go read up on hernia symptoms.

Carpet and upstairs paint

Here are a few pictures of our upstairs paint and carpet. We decided to go with a two tone frieze (mini shag) carpet so it could eventually be somewhat kidproof. It should be able to hide spills and stains somewhat well. I dropped my wallet on it, and couldn't find it for a week! OK. I'm kidding. Just two days.

Projects the weekend of 12/13

I didn't have any projects this past weekend. We had a few Christmas things going on, involving a Christmas party Saturday night that wiped me out for Sunday. Here's what I need to do next weekend.

1. Change air filters. Update: Done.
2. Cycle GSM switches. Update: Done.
3. Change smoke detector batteries and install carbon monoxide detector upstairs. Update: Done.
4. Put the closets back together. Update: I still have to do this.
5. Hang picture in master bedroom. Update: Done.
6. Break up the glacier in our driveway. Our hardwood floors are arriving early next week, and I don't want to slip carrying them up the driveway. Update: This was easier than I thought. I bought the scraper for the floors, and used that. It was a lot easier than using a shovel.
7. Buy vacuum cleaner. We have carpet fuzz everywhere! Update: Done. I learned that it's a lot easier to vacuum an empty room than one with furniture, or stairs. I was able to practice my "mowing" techniques in the empty rooms.

Bonus chore: I even spread some Christmas cheer. We bought a new wreath, and I setup a spotlight for it.

Projects the weekend of 11/29.

1. Finish painting the doors.
2. Cleanup the floors before the carpet comes on 12/3!

Update: We were able to finish these both in time for the carpet. Pictures of that should be coming soon.

Literally a Breakthrough

I was really distraught on Monday morning because of those floors. It was a major pain in the a** and a lot of chisseling just to get very few results. I think I was on a pace of 2 sqft per hour. I didn’t see how I was going to be able to finish my closet (roughly 6 x 8) in time for the carpet to get installed. I was willing to have Jen's closet just carpeted over the old hardwood. Then, pure dumb luck hit. I was ripping up this small 3”x6” piece (which was taking me about 10 minutes), and it was ripping up not only the glue, but the flooring below the glue. The farther I went, the more subfloor it ripped up. It was like trying to pick a dangling piece off a scab, but getting the whole scab with it. I thought I was going to have to replace the subfloor because of it. So, I got my circular saw and tried to cut it off before it got worse. I knew I had to cut a bit into the subfloor to do it, but was thinking it would be only for this one spot. So I cut, and pulled up “the scab”. I noticed a staple under the scab, so I picked at it a bit more. I noticed that I hadn’t been cutting into the subfloor, rather it was a thin piece of plywood that the flooring installer must have put down to keep the glue from seeping through to the main level of the house. So, I got my circular saw and started cutting at that depth. The picture below shows what I had done up until that point and the result of my literal "breakthrough". After that, I was able to remove chunks that were 2’ by 3’ large, and ripped up the rest of the floor in about an hour and a half. Now I just have to figure out how to leave a nice line of existing flooring in the doorway. The circular saw is only capable of cutting within a few inches of the doorframe, so I have to figure out how to extend that cut. That's a much smaller problem than the one I used to have though.