One thing we were eager to do differently in this house compared with our last one was to actually have a working TV in the master bedroom.
We did briefly own a TV in our previous master, but we never connected it to a DVD player or bothered with a second cable box. To be honest, it might not even have been plugged in.
We’re not obsessive about having a television in the bedroom, and we know it’s a divisive topic for some. Still, as two people who often stay in “blog mode” at night, we thought a bedroom TV might help us stop working from bed and instead relax into something that isn’t a laptop. So we ordered two set-top boxes for the new house—one for downstairs and one for the bedroom.
But the bedroom TV sat unhooked again. When we had Verizon out before the move, the technician suggested he could place the jack in the attic and I could finish the installation later once the furniture was in place. He left a rough hole and encouraged me to handle the final routing myself. Whether he was persuasive or just eager to finish his work, the result was another unconnected bedroom TV—until we at least hooked up the Blu-ray for occasional weekend movies.
I’d never done in-wall wiring before, so I approached the job cautiously. The plan was simple: run a coaxial cable from an existing splitter in the attic down through the wall and out a new jack in the bedroom. With the cable guy’s basic advice and a few YouTube tutorials under my belt, I climbed into the attic to locate the right spot to drill.
To find the correct wall, I followed an existing electrical wire in the attic. That helped me identify the wall’s position among the insulation and rafters, since the wall I needed runs parallel to the joists. I also located the phone line that goes to the bedroom, which further confirmed I was over the correct stud bay.
Translating measurements from the bedroom to the attic proved trickier than expected: drywall offsets, exposed rafters and the like made it hard to line things up precisely. So instead of relying solely on measurements, I used fixed reference points—like the visible phone wire—to estimate where to drill.
Downstairs I used a jab saw to cut a small hole in the drywall where I wanted the jack to appear, hoping it would line up with the hole I drilled from the attic.
To bridge the two holes through the insulation and framing, I bought a set of glow rods from Home Depot. These flexible fiberglass rods are stiff enough to push through insulation yet bendable to snake around framing. They glow in the dark, which helps when you’re working between walls.
I fed the glow rod down through the attic and into the wall cavity. It took a bit of effort to push through the insulation, but eventually I felt it reach the bottom where the hole in the bedroom drywall was located.
At first my measurements were slightly off and the two holes ended up on opposite sides of the same stud. Rather than cut more drywall, I drilled a few more small holes in the attic until I found one that lined up perfectly with the hole in the bedroom. When the glow rod finally poked through the drywall, it felt like a minor triumph.
One oversight: I forgot to attach the coaxial cable to the glow rod on the first attempt. I pulled it back out, taped the cable securely to the rod, and snaked it back through until the cable emerged where I wanted it in the bedroom.
With the cable in place, I finished the installation using a simple coax wall plate from Home Depot. The coax threaded into the back of the plate the same way it would attach to a cable box, and then I screwed the plate to the drywall. It’s not a custom finished install, but it’s far neater than cable poking up through a random floorboard like in past homes.
Back in the attic, I connected the other end of the coaxial cable to the existing splitter. That splitter had previously served the guest room, but we had removed that feed when we installed new hardwood floors before moving in.
Everything was ready for TV in the bedroom. Then Verizon introduced an unrelated regional glitch that required trips to their store and a couple of set-top box swaps to get everything working. The back-and-forth was tedious, but eventually the system came online. I passed the time with a few selfies and a couple hours chatting with support.
Once it was all configured, the multi-room DVR worked beautifully. Shows we record on the downstairs TV are now viewable in the bedroom. It’s surprisingly satisfying to watch a recorded show upstairs without running another cable box downstairs.
Yes, the jack currently sits near the other outlet and behind a narrow dresser rather than hidden entirely. We plan to replace that dresser with a wider piece eventually, so it made sense to keep outlets consolidated in one spot for now rather than spread them across the wall. When the new furniture arrives the plate will be out of sight.
A white connector cable would blend in better, but that’s an easy future tweak. In the end, we avoided Verizon’s $150 installation fee, spending about $40 on materials and a couple of hours on the project (not counting time on the phone resolving the DVR glitch). For my first in-wall wiring job, it was a successful and satisfying DIY.
Psst—We announced this week’s Kohler giveaway winner, so check the Rafflecopter box on this week’s post to see if it’s you.