3 Ways to Add an Outlet In a Finished Room

here are three methods for adding an outlet to an already finished wall for our first method we're gonna be running power from this existing outlet over to a new outlet that we'll place over here this one's typically behind a bookshelf so we want one that's exposed and easier to get to we're going to start by using the milwaukee fastback here or any sharp blade i just think these are super handy and we're going to score all of the caulking along this baseboard i picked this idea up from my buddy scott over everyday home repairs he is incredibly handy and has some amazing content on his channel so be sure to check that out be sure to score your ends as well because anything that's caulked or painted we want to give that a nice clean place to break without causing any tearing the easiest way to remove our baseboard is to use one of these trim remover tools like this super handy they're pretty inexpensive and they work really well i'm going to place a drywall knife a six inch knife up against it to help prevent any damage to the wall and if you don't have these tools you can also get away with a pry bar but make sure to always try to put something up against the wall to act as leverage so that you don't damage the drywall once it's all loosened up you can typically just pop the entire board out another option with this is to use a multi tool to cut a line but because this wall is fairly short it's pretty much what you see in frame here i'm just going to pop the whole thing out with our drywall exposed underneath here i'm going to use a stud finder and i'll be using different side finders throughout the video because i have a lot of them because i've compared a lot of them i'm going to just use the stud finder and mark where each of the studs is i'm going to use some inch and a half wide tape which is about the same width as a 2x4 on its edge and so i'll just use that for each one of these and mark above in the paint here where all of the studs are from the old outlet or the source outlet to the new one that i want to put in place i'm now ready to cut into the drywall and i'm going to aim to cut it maybe about a quarter inch below where our caulk line is now so that when i put this all back together nothing will be exposed nothing will be shown shouldn't be any bumpy parts i'm gonna use what i think is the easiest way to do this and this is just one of my multi-tools i love these things because you can do so much with them and i've got a half round saw blade on here that will do drywall really easily if you don't have a multi-tool you can really just use a blade like a box cutter for example will do the job just fine you just have to make multiple passes or you can use a jab saw and that will also do a good job next i'll use my drill to remove any drywall screws that i find there and then i should be ready to pull this thing off i'm going to try to do this all in one piece if i can all right so you can see on my two ends i'm halfway through that stud and halfway through that stud which is exactly where we need to be now i have insulated all the walls in my basement here for soundproofing we have a home theater just over there and i wanted to make sure my kids could sleep down here pretty soundly even when we're kind of cranking it in the home theater so that's why there's insulation in here and again it just helps to show this whether it's insulated or not this job can be done almost the same way our next step is to remove the face plate on our old our source outlet here keep calling it an old outlet it's really just a source outlet and then we're going to take this out but before we do that we're going to shut the power off to this area which means our lighting is about to change because i'm going to rely on battery power for the rest of this now with my power off i'm testing making sure the power is off i flip the breaker so i'm good to go there and i actually just remembered when i finished this basement and did all the electrical i specifically put the lights on separate circuits from the outlets for just such occasions if i need to work on the outlets i can have the lights on so way to go past nils for thinking of that with this power off i'm just going to take this outlet out and pull everything out so i have access to it like so in my case i've got these little blue plastic boxes for all of my outlets and such and they have a little strain relief knockouts in the back so i should be able to actually feed like maybe reach up under here and feed my new romex cable into there so that's what i'm going to try if you do have metal boxes that have actual knockouts then you can knock out your hole make sure to put a strain relief in place when you do that the last thing you want to do is just feed the wire up and have it rubbing against that raw metal edge which is likely to cause problems down the road with our outlet readied we're now ready to drill some holes in each of these studs and you can use any type of drill bit that you need that will get the job done i'm using this 16 inch diablo speed tip bit i've had good luck with these in the past and i actually just bought this long one here today for this project i'm using the long one because it'll allow me to get a fairly straight hole if you use a shorter one you can potentially fit it in here if your drill will let you so you've got both options but i want to go with something where i can have a lot of leverage from back here to do this so i am going to have to push this insulation out of the way as i do this and this particular kind has the tip on it that i can use with either an impact driver or a traditional drill so i'm going to start i really only need one hole here here and here because my new outlet box is going to go right on the outside of this stud and the other thing i need to keep in mind i'm going to try to get these right in the center code dictates that anything closer than one and a quarter inch needs to have a nail plate on it i'm gonna try to do this so that that doesn't apply but i got nail plates here that i'm gonna put in place just in case and then that way when i put everything back together no one will drive a nail or brad for their baseboard into this wire so i'm keeping that in mind trying to keep this dead center as much as i can so if you check these boxes out this is what's called a depth adjustable box so it's got a little slot there that can slide forward and backward you drive two screws into the stud and then when you loosen those screws you can slide it in and out which means that if you put up some ship lap or some different fascia or panels or anything like that then you can adjust the depth of the box which is pretty cool these boxes cost about 350 for the adjustable kind and then you can also buy these ones for about 250 and these are stationary but it's the same concept you drive your two screws in there you've got your knockouts in the back for strain relief and then you can mount this too so i'm just going to try out one of these depth adjustable boxes for this new one here we're going to be running some 14 2 wire through here to match what's already in the wall and i've got a spool of it right here so we're just going to start by getting our rough measurements you need to have at minimum six inches coming up out of the box i always like to do about a foot and then i can cut it to length there we go okay once i've got it i can grab the end and start to feed it through again minimum six inches i like to leave a little more like that and from there i'm going to feed the rest of the wire through our new holes fasten this both of these screws in place there we go they lock in now that i've got my new wire that is going to feed the new outlet i'm going to disconnect everything here i'm going to create what are called pigtails and there will only be one set of wires coming to the outlet instead of two or three and what that does is it makes it so that if this outlet fails for any reason then it's not going to be a problem because the electricity will still continue flowing to the other outlets and then i can address this one all by itself so i'm going to start down here i'm going to use my blade to score the end and then just peel it back i'm going to peel it back as far in the box as you can really like that get your paper out and get your paper off your ground as well and that leaves you with all this excess here that we can cut use my wire strippers to i've got some extra piece here um that i just cut off so i'm going to take some of these out there's some neutral some ground and some hot so now that i have all of these out i'm going to straighten off straighten out or cut all of my ends here i think these look in good enough shape that i'm just going to straighten them out so i'm going to cut a short pigtail here maybe six inches should be enough i'm going to take that with my other grounds line the ends all up so that tips should all be in about the same place feed them in and then the objective here is to keep twisting until the part on the outside twist together twice so those three are connected and i've got my one pigtail coming out i'll do the same with the hots here our black wires okay you can already see that one's got way too much exposed cut that one to size so now we just have three wires coming out and that's what we'll connect to our outlet itself bend a quick shepherd's hook in these i'm going to use my ecx screwdriver here you can use robert's number two works really well on this and then phillips or flathead they all work but i think the ecx is the best fit good we'll put our face plate on i always like to line up my screws vertically or horizontally but i prefer vertically just as long as it's not diagonal right now this new one is going to be much easier i'm going to use one of my nicer outlets here these ones have the side connectors where i can just push right in so this one will go pretty quick beautiful i'm going to put my nail plates in place and i only need a few of them i'm going to try to be careful to kind of center these give myself enough room to drive a brad nail up on the top there right about there looks good next we can put our drywall back on put that in when you're driving these screws back in you can use the same screws but don't use the same holes so all of these long brads like this i'm just going to use a pair of flush cut snips here and just clip them off like this anytime we can be let's be nice to our future selves or the future homeowners who might be working on baseboard so on these three studs where we put the nail plates i'm just going to kind of draw that in there and then i just need to push them back down [Music] and then the last thing we need to do is a little bit of caulking to seal this up again and i've got a video that i'll link to in the description with some tips on how to like a pro make it pretty easy time to turn the power back on okay power's back on let's see what we've got okay we've got correct wiring on this one great and correct wiring on that one so we are good to go we now have a new outlet and there's almost no sign that anything was done here which is great a little bit of caulking to do and we're good to go let's check out method two our second method is actually one of the cleanest methods and easiest ones to do in terms of patchwork and that kind of stuff there's no caulking there's no patchwork and there's one little optional piece that you can do but you can pretty much do this whole thing without ever touching anything in this wall except for the hole where the new outlet will go so i'm going to extend an outlet from this existing one over to here and the big caveat for this method is you do need to have access either above or below so that involves some attic space up above or some crawl space down below our first step is to locate the stud in the area where we want to put the new outlet and also locate the stud next to the existing outlet you can use any standard stud finder to find this i just want to verify if this stud is on the left or the right side of our outlet here it doesn't appear to be on the left there's a wire i'm guessing it's on the right yep there it is on the right okay so i'm going to mark that off with some tape so let me mark that now i thought it was worth noting that i did mess this up here i actually didn't take my time to mark the stud accurately i just kind of marked roughly where it was so i ended up cutting that a little too far over but after putting this in and testing out to make sure my box will fit in there which it fits perfectly then also just looking at our plate here if i open this up i think will actually be just fine yeah so i think we can actually cover everything up just fine with that so i think we are safe in this case but just a good reminder to make sure you're marking that accurately kind of start on the side of the stud and move your way over to it rather than just starting on that left edge like i did not the best move there turn the power off to the area you're going to be working on and for most di wires i think it's a lot easier to actually remove the electrical box in question rather than to try to fish those wires up through two tiny holes very far apart you can use a multi-tool with a metal cutting blade to just cut right through the nails and i think that's the easiest way to go but there is also a hacksaw set that you can get for tight access like this one by dewalt once those are out we just need to pull those wires out and fish the box through now that i've got my holes ready for the source outlet as well as the new outlet i want to do everything i can to make things as quick as possible when i go up into the attic or down to the crawl space in my case it's an attic situation so what i'm going to do are i'm going to get some measurements first make sure i know how much wire i need for my romex cable and where to drop these and drill my holes to drop my wires down in before i do either of those things and sorry about the beeping that's my power supply telling me that the power is out right now before i do either of those i'm going to take my stud finder and i'm going to move it up the stud bays where i need to drop the wires what i'm doing here is checking for fire blocks those are those horizontal two by fours that are designed to slow the spread of fire so if i have those it's okay we can work with those but i want to identify that beforehand now once i've got that checked out i'm going to do some measurements and you may have seen some of my other videos i always like to keep some painters tape on the outside of my measuring tape here and a marker and that way i can write down my measurements as i go so i don't have to try to memorize anything so what i'm going to do is try to figure out from a reference point where i need to drill the holes up in the top plate in the attic so i'm going to start from this area back here and i can see that i need to come at least about 20 inches to get to this hole and now i've got drywall and some trim and things like that so i want to go probably a little bit over 20. maybe i go 22 inches or so and then on the second one here i want to go further i'm sure let's see how much this one's coming in at around 80. and because the stud is on the outside i might want to come a little shy of that so we have somewhere around 80 inches so now that i know that the next thing i'm going to do is actually pre-mark and measure my romex cable that i'm going to be dropping down here one last thing while we're here you may have noticed that i actually have insulation in this stud bay right here i don't have any here which is kind of unusual to have some in one stud bay and not one you know a few down from it so i'm going to need some help probably to put that romex wire down and i'll show you this more when we get to this stage but i've got this wire puller from klein here and there are many options but this is a very strong magnet here and it's going to allow me to tie my romex cable here drop it in the wall and then use this little guider to guide it down and pull it out this hole even with the insulation there so that's something i'm going to use to make my life a lot easier you can do it without it but it's very likely that the romex will get snagged and caught as you try to feed it down so having a tool like this especially for insulated areas makes a big difference next i'll head up into the attic which is approximately 4621 degrees we'll start by moving about 20 inches away from that far wall and there happens to be a truss right there so i'm going to drill our hole to the left side of that or the inside of it i'm drilling a three quarter inch hole here and there should be at least one if not two top plates to get through here and in this case there's two we'll drop our romex down and because we've pre-marked it we know exactly how far to drop it down i'm then going to measure these 60 inches away from that hole to the second one over here i'm drilling a one inch hole so that i can feed the in-wall portion of the wire puller down through and all we really need is just maybe one to two feet just enough to grab it with a magnet inside the house you might need to move around and feel around but once you locate it it'll snap and then you can just pull that down very gently and you might have to use some different techniques here in some cases i had to do a little bouncing motion to try to get it to pull down but for most of it it just moved down pretty slowly and securely once you get it in place you can actually pull it right through reach up and grab that and then you've got your wire ready so here's the other one and i'm hoping i can just find it right here yep oh there it is okay i got it and get to the bottom of it there we go pull the bottom through and i've got plenty of slack there as well next we're going to fit the new box into the wall making sure to pull that wire through we'll get everything wired up just like we did in the first method we'll pull all of the old wires plus the one new one through the new box on the source side and then this time i've chosen to use some wago connectors these are ul listed connectors and they make it really easy to connect everything up these ones are kind of big so you want to make sure you have lots of room because i had to do the five clip version in this case then we feed everything back into the box secure it and we're good to go i've now flipped the power back on and i'm testing the new outlet and it looks like everything is perfect there now that we've tested the new outlet let's test the old one make sure that one's good there we go 122 volts and correct so with that we have another successful install for our third method we're out here in the garage with our green screen wall i built this wall so that you could actually see right through the wall with our stud finder test that i did in a prior video and that allowed you to see exactly what the stud finder should see versus what they did see now i'm gonna use this to show how you can actually do our third technique sometimes you can't run the wires through the baseboard that's just not an option with our first method and you also don't have access to an attic or a crawl space with our second method so you're left with something like this now unfortunately this does involve some patchwork with your drywall and some paint afterwards kind of no way around that but if that's the situation that you're in here's how to do it you've got a couple of main options the first one is we can drill or cut a fairly large hole on one side and then where we want our new outlet or other wiring we'll drill another one on the opposite side of that and then you can drill through the studs in between and pass your wires through now my philosophy on this is if you're going to do that you may as well just open up the wall you're doing two separate patch jobs there and you're also having to do a kind of subpar patch because it's not the best circumstance as far as attaching that drywall because you're attaching it to sticks essentially behind the wall whereas you could be attaching it to the studs just like we did with the baseboards so we'll really end up doing the same type of strip that we did with the baseboards but we'll do it up here and again we're going to end on the actual studs themselves right in the middle i've gone ahead and marked these this is the end that we're going to use for one of them and then i'm just going to go right off to the edge of the wall in this case because there's a stud there as well so first we're going to use our straight edge here we'll draw a line this is just a guide for as we're cutting we'll be able to use that and then i'll do another one just sitting right on top of our ship lap here yeah there we go now that we've got this strip opened up you can see everything in here and again the reason i like this over just cutting two different holes is because we have total access to everything and then you're just doing one patch job at the end now you can use your drill to drill some holes through here pass the wires connect them to your existing source outlet if you wanted to do another one right here for example just like before cut that hole open pass up your romex pass it through wire it up and then we just have to patch up the wall now speaking of that that can be super intimidating to a lot of people and i totally get that it's not something that we really learn to do so i invited a buddy of mine over who is a professional drywaller and he showed us how to do a perfect patch job on a situation like this as well as several others in fact i trusted him so much we actually punched a bunch of holes in my daughter's bedroom wall and after we patched everything and painted it you have no idea that it ever happened and that is what a good patch job can look like so if you want to put this piece back on afterwards and after you get everything wired up you can do that patch it up and you'll be good to go be sure to check that video out right up here in the corner in case you need to end up using the third method for adding an outlet to your wall my name is nils with learn to diy thanks for watching

Channel: LRN2DIY

Views: 370,725

Keywords: diy, how-to, lrn2diy

Id: c5VfZ9n66JQ

Length: 21min 36sec (1296 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 14 2022