Gone Fishin’

A couple of our Christmas presents this year involved fishing wires through the walls. First we ran ethernet cable through the cellar. We have all of the computer equipment at one end of the house and the TV type stuff at the other end. When they had to talk to each other, they used WIFI, but it was starting to become clear that we really needed to run cable as the amount of traffic increased.

Running the ethernet cable wasn’t too bad, although our cellar ceiling is closed in with metal lathe and plaster. It did give the kids a chance to learn the basics of using fish tape to pull wires. It’s good they got that practice, because the next project was a bit more challenging.

We wanted to move a light switch to a more convenient place for a new light (I’ll post a picture of that later). Going around a corner without punching a great big hole can be awfully tricky. First we went into a neighboring closet and drilled a small diagonal hole between the wall cavity and the ceiling cavity. Even that was an adventure. The plaster on the wall was about 3” thick, and there’s a row of bricks along the top plate which I hit on my first try.

Once we had that hole, we ran fish tape in through the ceiling while someone peered through the hole. After lots of back and forth and do overs (it took us close to 3 hours) we managed to get the tape through and then pull the wire back through the other direction.

Once we had the wire pulled, we knocked off for the day. We’ll come back when we’re fresh to get the light hooked up.