How To Add An Outlet To A Finished Wall

you can never have too many outlets and that is the scenario i'm facing today i have an outlet about four feet away from my corner and i want to place a table back in that corner because this is an airbnb that i'll be listing soon and i want to have a little charging station back there so i'm going to run you through the full process but specifically for this one what if you do not have attic access or access to a basement or crawl space like this where you could run romex down over to your new location and then up to your old work box don't worry it is still a completely doable diy project for those of us that are comfortable doing electrical work on our own homes and then how do we keep this an electrical project and not a drywall or painting project there is a little trick to that so stay tuned and i'll show you how to minimize the number of tools and supplies you'll need first up grab a utility knife and score the caulk line between the trim and the wall surface then a recommendation by you guys i got a zenith trim puller and i want to test it out because this is supposed to be the best way to pull trim without damaging your wall i do have to admit it is pretty awesome and will be in my regular rotation then you can just carefully pull the trim off the wall and watch there's probably a toenail fastener right at the end so you can use a little leverage and pluck it off without damaging the trim and then instead of knocking the nails out i just use end snips and i'll snip those nails off keeping that outside surface from damage so as you can see the trim still looks great and will be very easy to reinstall so first i'll remove the face plate of the outlet that will pull power from and the quote unquote trick that we're going to do is any drywall that we open up is going to be below the trim that we just removed so when we reinstall it hides any of our cut lines my trim is three and a half inches off the floor so my cut line cutting open the drywall is going to be at three and a quarter to make sure it's hidden by the trim once it goes back on the wall and then usually when you take your face plate off you can look in there and see where your studs are at or i just use a magnet stud finder that's the most common stud finder that i use and it doesn't find the studs it finds the fasteners on the studs so just attach to a screw that's holding the drywall on the wall so that means that i have a stud on this side that i'm going to have to go through i'm going to need to get my romex through that stud and then i can go offset find the next fastener and then confirm that i have 16 inches between studs that's the most common stud spacing and that's 16 inches on center that means from the center point of each stud they're spaced 16 inches so knowing that they're 16 inch space i can take the distance between my current outlet location and where i want to go i see that is a little over 48 inches so i know i'll have the first stud at the outlet second set here third stud at 32 inches from the outlet and then four stud at 48 and then i will be installing an old work box in the middle of two studs all right so now let's cut open some drywall the tool of choice is going to be the oscillating tool which works great for these type of cuts and then i made a small one by block which is three and a quarter inches tall which is right on my cut line then i just work my oscillating tool across the cut line and once i get to the end i can use that block to make a nice 90 degree cut i'll do one more pass here just making sure it's completely cut through all along the way and then clean up with the shop vac then what you'll want to do is remove any fasteners nails like i have or maybe screws i'm just using a 12 inch cat's paw to carefully remove those fasteners and make sure i don't damage the floor here's an example just prying the nail out slightly and then starting to work it away from the wall so it frees up that drywall i always tried to remove this as one piece if i broken two that's not the end of the world in this case it's working free and i'm able to actually remove it all as one piece and then do a final cleanup so let's get our new location we'll mark it 11 half inches off the floor and make sure the box is level eleven half inches will match the other outlets in the home so it'll look consistent i'll outline that old work box and then cut it out with that same oscillating tool taking my time not to over cut [Music] once you get that cut out [Music] now we'll go back to the existing outlet that we want to pull power from so i'll confirm no power and then i'll remove the outlet and then the way we'll get into this metal electrical box is from the bottom so go ahead and remove the knockout from the bottom of the box now for drilling through the studs i'm just going to use a diablo extension with a one inch spade bit what i'm trying to do is actually get up under in the middle of the stud but actually place the one inch hole above where the trim is going to go why do i do that because i'll be fastening the trim with brad nails in each of the studs so i want to ensure that those brad nails have no chance of piercing the romex which will help us avoid any issues so running the new wires really straight forward i'm just going to go from my new hole and then i'll go down and then start feeding through these studs now this is where some people take a shortcut and you should not we have our non-metallic that's going to go up through the bottom of our metal box you should not just run your non-metallic through that hole without some type of connector well sometimes it's hard to get a connector in there because you have limited access so what i do i give myself plenty of extra and then i go ahead and pre-install the connector taking the nut off of it but screwing down the connector on the non-metallic romax so now we have our connector on and we can feed our wire up up into our box then you can pull your wire through and you'll see you get to your connector then bring the nut over the romex so now we got that connector in place plenty of romex and it's protected coming up through that metal box so wiring is really straightforward on this one on that existing outlet i went with a pigtail setup where i ran pigtails to the old outlet and then back to my wago 221 lever nuts which you know are my go-to for wire connectors i have this milwaukee pack out set up which has all my standard components that i use on a very regular basis and this continually saves me trips to the hardware store now i'm not necessarily expecting diy-ers to build a setup like this but you might want to over time and if you need a reference as you're building out your own kit check down in the description you'll see my amazon store this has all my recommendations on there including in the electrical section you will see a few different starter kits for wago lever nuts those are by far the most common things that people buy from our amazon store and i literally have never heard a complaint of somebody trying wago 221 lever nuts and not liking them so we'll roll through the wiring here that is my new romex coming in i'll strip off the 12 gauge and also trim up the old wires coming in because all i'll be doing is going straight into these wago 221 three pin lever nuts and then pulling out a pigtail and that pigtail will go directly into our old outlet so i'm hot neutral and ground ground will go into the three pin and then i will actually j hook that ground because that will not go straight in that will go clockwise around the green screw terminal so we'll tighten that up and this one is a commercial grade so the it'll go straight in the back but that is not speed wiring or what's called backstabbing that is actually back wiring which pulls a plate and pinches that wire so it's a very secure hole so we'll mount the outlet and finish off with our cover plate then we'll take our old work back a box at the new location and make sure those tabs actually tighten on the back of the drywall sometimes you tighten those up and they actually don't squeeze on the back of the drywall strip off our new 12 gauge put a j hook in the ground clockwise around the screw terminal and then same thing this is a commercial grade so we use back wire and go straight in then we'll just mount everything up make sure it's straight and not crooked tighten it up and then we'll finish off with our cover plate and be consistent have your cover plate screws either horizontal or vertical so i'm gonna button everything up but first i got the power back on confirming we got power to our old outlet and let's see how we're doing on our new one yes so we're good so i put some painter's tape on the wall just to mark all the studs for my reference then i'm just going to use a single drywall screw at each of these studs to hold that piece of drywall that we had removed and that cat's paw just to press it up against the other drywall once that's in there i'll put the trim piece back in remember the trim piece didn't have any damage so i'll just use two brad nails each stud location to secure it and then this is what the finished product looks like pretty solid if you ask me so the last step would just be a little bit of caulking at the seam and then just covering each of those brad nail holes but to be honest i'm pretty much an amateur when it comes to caulking trim i can do it but i'm not awesome so i will hand you off to the professional ryan who has a channel called the funny carpenter he is the master at this and he has a ton of awesome tips and tricks on how to make caulking trim much easier and much less mess so thanks for stopping by and we'll catch you on that next video take care

Channel: Everyday Home Repairs

Views: 4,260,855

Keywords: electrical outlet installation, everyday home repairs, DIY

Id: nWfEANZOYSk

Length: 10min 50sec (650 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 16 2022