One thing we were excited to do differently in this house compared with our last was to have a working TV in the master bedroom.
We actually did have a TV in our previous master for a short time, but we never bothered to hook it up to a DVD player or get a second cable box. Honestly, I’m not even sure it was ever plugged in.
We’re not fanatics about TVs in the bedroom — it can be a divisive topic — but as two people who have a hard time switching out of blog mode at night, we hoped a bedroom TV would encourage us to stop working on our laptops and relax in bed instead. So we ordered a set-top box for the bedroom and another for downstairs. One step closer to living the dream.
Of course, we still didn’t get the bedroom TV hooked up right away. Before our move, the Verizon technician installed cable, phone, and internet so our alarm would work, but he didn’t know exactly where we wanted the upstairs cable jack once furniture was in place. He suggested I could install it later myself, which left me wondering whether he was persuasive or just eager to move on. Either way, the bedroom TV stayed inactive for a while (until we plugged in the Blu-ray player for an occasional weekend movie).
I’d never run wiring through walls before, so I wasn’t sure how it would go. The plan was simple: route a coaxial cable from a splitter in the attic, down through the wall, and out a new opening in the bedroom. Between the instructions the cable tech gave me and a few YouTube videos, I felt brave enough to start drilling in the attic. First I had to locate the right spot. I followed a visible electrical wire in the attic to find the wall — the wall I needed ran parallel to the joists.
After digging a bit, I also found the phone line that serves the bedroom, which gave me another clue. Seeing both wires routed through the attic floor reassured me I was aiming at the right board.
Translating measurements from the bedroom to the attic was tricky. Measuring against drywall downstairs and exposed rafters upstairs messed with my head, so I used fixed reference points instead. I could see the phone jack’s wire in the attic and knew where the jack lived in the bedroom, which helped me decide where to drill.
In the bedroom I cut a small opening with a jab saw where I wanted the cable to emerge, hopeful it lined up with the hole I drilled in the attic above.
To connect the two holes, I bought a set of glow rods from Home Depot. They’re flexible fiberglass rods — a bit like fishing poles — stiff enough to push through insulation, but flexible enough to route around obstacles. They glow in the dark, which helps when crawling inside walls.
Here you can see me pushing a glow rod through the attic. It took some effort to get through the blown-in insulation, but eventually I felt it hit the bottom plate of the wall.
I should have gone downstairs at that point to confirm the rod was visible through the drywall hole. I didn’t, and my alignment was off: my holes ended up just on either side of the same stud. Rather than cut more drywall downstairs, I drilled a few more holes in the attic until I found one that lined up perfectly. That moment felt glorious.
In my rush I forgot to attach the coaxial cable to the rod before pushing it through. I pulled the rod back out, taped the cable to it (there are certainly more professional methods), and fed it back through to the bedroom.
Once the cable was through, I removed the tape and installed a simple coax wall plate from Home Depot. The coax connector screws into the back of the plate like it does on a cable box, and then the plate screws to the drywall. It’s not the most polished approach possible, but it’s a major improvement over the cable poking up through a random floorboard — a setup we’d lived with in previous places.
I connected the attic end of the cable to the existing splitter. That splitter had once fed the guest room before we removed that hookup when we installed new hardwood floors before moving in.
So in theory we were ready to watch cable in the bedroom. Hooray! In practice, Verizon had other ideas. Rather than detail the back-and-forth, suffice it to say it included two trips to their store to swap set-top boxes while they diagnosed a local glitch. I documented the process with a few selfies while waiting through a long support call on a beautiful Saturday afternoon.
Eventually everything started working. The best part was getting multi-room DVR service running — shows recorded on the downstairs TV are accessible upstairs. Is this what it feels like to be king? Maybe.
Yes, it might seem odd to run the jack where it is, instead of hidden behind the dresser, but we plan to replace the skinny dresser with a wider one in this spot. For now, placing the cable near the other wall outlets keeps the visual clutter in one area that will soon be concealed.
We’ll probably pick up a white connector cable so it blends in better, but that can wait. For now I’m happy we avoided Verizon’s $150 installation fee. The project cost about $40 in materials and took an hour or two of hands-on work (not counting the hours on the phone resolving the DVR glitch). For my first attempt at in-wall wiring, it was a very satisfying DIY.
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