One change we were excited to make in this house compared with our last one was to finally have a TV in the master bedroom.
We technically had a TV in our previous master for a short while, but we never bothered to hook up a DVD player or add a second cable box — I’m not even sure the set was fully plugged in.
We aren’t die-hard proponents of bedroom TVs (it’s a debate), but as two people who have a hard time switching out of work and blog mode at night, we hoped that watching a show in bed would help curb the laptop habit. So we ordered two set-top boxes for this house and got ready to run cable to the bedroom.
That plan hit a snag at first. To get our alarm system functioning we needed a phone line, so Verizon installed cable, phone, and internet before we moved in. But because we hadn’t placed our bedroom furniture yet, we weren’t sure where to have the installer put the cable jack upstairs. The installer suggested I could finish it myself later — whether he was persuasive or just hustling out of more work, I don’t know. Either way, the bedroom TV remained unconnected for a while (we did hook up the Blu-ray for weekend movies).
I’d never done in-wall wiring before, so I wasn’t sure how it would go. The plan was simple: run a coaxial cable from an existing attic splitter, down through the wall, and out at a new location in the bedroom. Armed with the installer’s basic guidance and a few YouTube demos, I climbed into the attic to start drilling.
To find the right wall, I followed a visible electrical wire in the attic to locate the top of the interior wall (the wall I needed ran parallel to the joists). I also found the phone line tied to the bedroom jack, which reassured me that I was in the right place to make a hole in the attic floor.
Translating measurements between the attic (where rafters are exposed) and the finished bedroom (with drywall) was trickier than I expected. Instead of relying on confusing dimensional math, I used fixed reference points like the bedroom phone jack location and the visible wire runs in the attic to estimate where to drill.
Downstairs, I cut a small access hole where I wanted the coax to emerge, using a jab saw and hoping it would align with the hole I planned to make in the attic.
To connect the attic hole with the bedroom opening I bought a set of glow rods from Home Depot. These flexible fiberglass rods are stiff enough to push through insulation but bendable enough to snake around framing. They also glow, which makes them easier to spot in dark cavities.
I pushed a glow rod through the attic into the wall and, after a little effort getting through the insulation, I felt it hit the bottom of the cavity.
At this point I should have checked downstairs to confirm the rod was visible through my drywall hole. I didn’t — and my holes ended up marginally offset on opposite sides of the same stud. Rather than create a larger mess, I drilled a few more attic holes until I found one that lined up perfectly. That moment felt like a win.
In my hurry to snake the rod through I forgot to attach the coaxial cable, so I pulled it back, taped the cable to the rod, and snaked it back through the wall. It’s not the most professional technique, but it worked.
With the cable threaded, I withdrew the glow rod and prepared the wall plate I bought at Home Depot. The coax screwed into the back of the plate just like it would on a cable box, and then I screwed the plate onto the drywall. It’s a simple, tidy finish and a big improvement over cable sticking up through an old floorboard.
Up in the attic I connected the other end of the coax to the existing splitter. That splitter had formerly fed the guest room. We’d removed the old feed when installing hardwood floors, so this was a straightforward reconfiguration.
We were almost ready to watch cable in the bedroom, but Verizon had a few setbacks on their end. After a couple of trips to the store and a bit of customer support time to resolve a regional glitch, the multi-room DVR service finally came online. That meant shows we record on the downstairs DVR could be watched upstairs — a small royal privilege.
We placed the jack next to the other outlet on that wall instead of hiding it behind the dresser, since we plan to replace the dresser with a wider unit later. Consolidating outlets into one spot keeps things neater until the final furniture piece arrives.
A white connector cable would blend in better with the plate, but that’s an easy tweak for another weekend. All told, we avoided the roughly $150 install fee the provider charges: the job took about $40 in materials and a couple of hours of hands-on work (not counting the time spent troubleshooting the DVR issue). For my first DIY in-wall wiring project, it was satisfying, educational, and worth the effort.
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