Remember a couple of weekends ago when I decided to wire my condo for cable while under the influence of the Bird Flu? Well today, I’m afraid, the saga continues…
I borrowed a drill bit from my dad that was at least a foot long, so drilling through whatever freak mutant thing was living in the middle of my wall shouldn’t be a problem. (Read the original post if you don’t know what I’m talking about.) I shuffle furniture around in my bedroom so that I can get to the hole I’ve already started.
I squeeze myself into the corner between the wall and the television in my bedroom and begin to drill…and nothing. Whatever is in the middle of this wall just isn’t budging. Frustrated, I go into my daughter’s room to try from that side of the wall. This time, I have success! After a little drilling, I can now see daylight coming through the hole in the wall, letting me know that I have indeed drilled all the way through to my bedroom. Excited by my success, I shove one end of the coaxial cable through the wall before going back to my room to pull it through and attach it to the new wall jack. This, however, is what awaits me in my bedroom: (there would be a picture here, if Mulitply hadn’t shut down! Use your imagination to visualize two holes in the wall that are about 2 feet apart.)
I thought I was so smart when I first drilled the holes – I chose where I wanted the jacks to go, drilled the hole on one side, measured the distance from the corner and floor to the hole, then went and found (what I thought was) that same spot on the other side of the wall. Well. Apparently, my bedroom extends farther out the front of the building than my daughter’s room does, and I never noticed. So what I thought was the same spot on both sides of the wall…wasn’t. Not even close. Good thing I didn’t try harder to get through the wall from my room, or else I would now have a new window.
This evening’s revelation does explain a few things that didn’t seem to make sense before…like the insulation I found in the wall when I drilled from my side of the wall – at the time, I thought it wasn’t supposed to be there, because I thought it was an interior wall. Ha. It also explains the whole “why are my interior walls so freakishly thick and is there another board in the middle” question. Um, because you were drilling in two separate places, idiot. There was no “middle board”, and the walls aren’t any thicker than normal.
After realizing that I now have a credit-card-sized hole in my wall with nothing to cover it, I also realized that I seriously miscalculated the number of coaxial cables I was going to need for this project. Any other person would have just given up and called Comcast at this point, but now it was a challenge, damn it, and I was going to get this done, tonight, by myself.
So…one run to Home Depot for more coaxial cables at 8:00pm, a huge hole in the wall and a whole lot of frustration later, I now have cable tv in my living room and both bedrooms.
Does anybody know how to patch drywall? 🙂