How to pull wire... the hard way .. when you don't have open stud
bays or joist bays. I'm going to show you how to get the wire
from where you're going, to where you need to go. [There it comes] and how to repair the damage
you made along the way [that's it right there ... smoother than the rest of the wall]. So we need to get from here, through a joist
which runs right here, along here, into this wall through the top plate, and down into
the basement. So the first thing we need to do is turn off
the power to the smoke detectors. This pulls straight out. Feel in there really good. Now we know that the power is really off. There we go. So we're about eight inches. Which puts us right there. We might not have to go through this one. Let's see. So we go over there -- here's the stairs coming
down -- we might be able to get into the wall (I think the joist is right here) we might
be able to get in over here, and come down here. So we know we have to go through this part
of the wall right here. I think there are some studs right here. I think the studs are on this this side of
this joist, so we are going to need to go through this joist to get into right here, to find a way to drill through
this joist, and get through here, through the top plate and down through this wall to
the basement. So basically everywhere there needs to be
a bend in the cable, we're going to have to make a cut in the drywall. So I'm going to have to cut on this side of
the joist up here, so that when we drill through the joist I have a way to bend the cable toward
the wall over here. Then we're also going to have to make a cut
in the drywall right here, so that we can fish down through the wall, and we'll have
to make a cut somewhere in the middle of the wall right here so that we can actually take
a fish bit and drill up through the top plate to pull that wire down, and also run the fish
bit down through the bottom plate to pull the wire into the basement. So I've cut out this little roughly 8x8 cardboard
template, and we're just going to use this to mark some spots to cut some holes. The first hole I'm going to mark is on this
side of this joist, directly in line with the old electrical box. I might end up hitting the joist here. We're good. I don't want to go too far up and down, just
because there might be other wires up there, and there's a lot of insulation up there so
I'm just trying to cut as shallow as possible. I should probably wear a dust mask. Now that I think about it, I could have probably
cut this hole somewhere right around here, so I'd be halfway between the top plate of
this wall and that. But it is what it is. So we can just imagine this would have been
a longer span I had run, and now I need to cut a hole over here, for us to be able to
bend the wire down into the top-plate. We're also going to save the piece of drywall
we cut out so that we can use those to patch our holes when it's all said and done, and
I've written hall center on this. We'll make a note where each one goes, so
that we know they all fit exactly where they need to go. And now you can see why it's so important
to cut shallow. Got some wires up here I did nick this one,
but it just went through the sheathing and not through the wire itself. So I'm just going to wrap a little electrical
tape around that. That's totally harmless. Wire actually gets nicked as much as that
when you're just pulling cable anyway, so that's all perfectly good don't go sawing
deep, or you'll bite into this and if it's hot then that could be dangerous. Okay, another tricky bit that I've run into
is this blocking back here is actually on this side of the wall plate. So there is a double wall plate at the top
of this wall -- that means two 2x4s -- and then this blocking right here sits on top
of that. Yeah, I can feel the top plate right there,
and it is right at the edge of that. So what I'm going to try to do is I'm going
to go ahead and cut a hole in the middle of this wall where I can use my fish bit and
go down through the floor and up through the top plate, and I'm going to try to bend the
fish-bit so that it actually comes through the edge of the double top-plate up there,
so that we can go ahead and fish through this hole. I'm going to try to go somewhere midway so
that I know my fish-bit will reach up and reach down. If we did it all the way at the top, then
we wouldn't be able to reach down to the bottom, and vice-versa if we went to the bottom. So this is the fish bit which we'll be using
to drill the holes, and you see it's only so long so. It has to be able to get all the way through
to the top-plate, and then it has to be able to get all the way through the bottom-plate,
so ideally the hole should be right around here. If you have an oscillating multi-tool, you
can put one of these blades on it right here, and it actually only goes to about the thickness
of drywall, so that actually makes it safer when you're cutting holes in drywall and you
don't want to nick wires. So I'm going to switch over to that right
now but if you just have a keyhole saw, just keep those cuts shallow. Now you can see I actually have some wires
in this wall, but I believe these are old and no longer in use. They're safe anyways. We also have a cable to a thermostat. All right, now as I said before, the trick
is going to be to drill up through the top plate at this sort of an angle so that we
can come out on this side of the block. I don't know if we can do it, but we're going
to do this side first, because if we can't do this side, we might as well not even do
the bottom yet until we figure out how to get through the top. The cool thing about fish bits is they are
flexible, and so most of them come with a tool like this -- if not you can buy it -- and
it wraps around the bit like this, and enables you to manipulate it. So what we're going to do is stick it in our
hole here, and hopefully bend it in such a way that it comes through the front of that
top plate, and comes out on this side of the blocking. So here we go. I'm bending it so I feel it rubbing on the
inside of this drywall, and I'm going to kind of press it against the drywall and run it
all the way to the top, so hopefully when it starts drilling it'll bite and move this
way. All right we're through something. Let's see what we got going on up here. Oh yeah, oh yes. Well we did it -- just barely. There is the drill bit right there. We just made it on this side of that joist,
and through the top-plate, and we didn't damage the wall. It came up exactly where we needed it to come. So now we're basically home free. Now we just need to drill through the bottom-plate
and run our wire. Now I believe if I just shoot straight for
the middle of the bottom of this wall I'm gonna be okay. I don't think there are any obstructions down
there. Let's go down in the basement and see what
happened. Well looky there. We didn't even need that hole there was already
a big hole right there. Oh well, we're definitely where we want to
be. Oh, I almost forgot. Before we pull our cable, we've got to drill
a hole through that joist right there, so that we can get to the box. Now I can probably just use a regular drill
bit with maybe a right angle attachment, or a shorty drill bit and a regular drill, but
since I got this fish-bit out here I'm just going to go ahead and go straight through
with that. There we go. We're working with a 15 amp circuit here,
so we are going to use 14 gauge Romex wire (NM cable). This is 14/3, so it has the four wires we
need. It has the white neutral, bare copper ground,
and the red signal wire, and the black hot. I'm going to start in this hole over here
and I'm going to pull the cable over to there, and then push it through and hopefully pull
it out where electrical box will go, and then we'll work on getting it down that wall. Now I'm going to need to actually cut the
wire, so I've got to guesstimate how much wire I need to get through here down through
that wall into the basement and to wherever I'm going to put my smoke detector. I'm just going to kind of drape this along
the wall and pull some extra, and just like I said, guesstimate. Always better to have too much wire than not
enough. You can always use the cutoffs to do pigtails
for other wiring needs. Put this in this hole in the corner ... there it goes. It's popping out at our hole down here. So we can pull that on through and at the
same time I'm making sure I'm reaching up and feeding it so there are no kinks. Now we just need to get it through our hole
and into the basement. So this is fish-tape. It's basically a reel that you can pull out
like a tape measure, and this is a metal -- pretty stiff metal -- band, and the end of it has
a hole in it, and I've actually -- this one didn't come very round, but I've rounded it
off a little bit more so it's easier to slip through holes. And what we're going to do is we're going
to feed it up through our new hole over there -- or the old hole -- doesn't really matter
-- and since this is stiff, it'll stay upright while it's in the wall cavity, and we'll see
it pop out somewhere around our cutout. We can stick one of our wires from our new
cable through this hole, bend it back, twist it, wrap some tape around it to hold it securely,
and we can just pull the fish-tape and the wire down here into the basement. We'll kind of hang that right there. Now we'll go back up the stairs and hook our
wire to it and pull it through. Look at that the fish tape came up and actually
out the hole, so it's just waiting there for us. I'm gonna go ahead and take off some of the
sheathing. I'll try to do it with this. We need only one of these wires, so we'll
cut the others off. Let's pull it with the with the red wire. These can be pigtails in the future. Here just going to stick this through a little
more than halfway, and I want this to be a nice, tight fold in
it right there. We're not going to reuse this wire because
this will be compromised. We'll cut that out and discard it afterwards. And I'm also going to twist it and I'm going
to take some electrical tape -- this isn't really necessary for this hole, but if you're
fishing in a place where you don't have as much access as we have, you want to tape it
up to pretty good -- and this helps to just make it smoother for the wire to go through,
so there's not as much to snag on. It just keeps everything nice and tight together. And this transition between the wire and the
Romex sheathing and all it needs to be kind of tapered, so that it slips through pretty
easily. And also, I've learned this the hard way,
make sure you cover all the way to the bottom end of the wire that you folded over, because
if you do get snagged, and you have to pull the wire back out, sometimes that'll act like
a barb and pull up, and then you won't be able to go forward or backward so cover that
up too. Rub it on there nice and tight now just go
back and pull our fish tape back through which will pull the cable down. There it comes. Now we'll just unwrap our tape, pull our wire
out, and we'll go ahead and cut that wire off. Now this box is way overkill, but I happen
to have it on hand. That gives us plenty of ... yeah, I'm gonna
go ahead and poke this wire into the box before I nail it up there -- or screw it up there. Now let's go back upstairs and wire everything
back into that box that we tapped into. All right, now let's go back down to the basement
and turn the breaker on see if it all works. Now we've got to patch some holes. This is Easy Sand 20. Just a little bit in the bottom there. Hmm, maybe I should go easier on the water
until I see what we've got. Get a little bowl of water here for my tape. Most people don't use water on their tape,
but I really do find it reduces bubbles. Rub off any loose pieces. These will telegraph through the paper if we don't get rid of them. Now if you've never done this before, paper
tape -- drywall tape -- has a front and a back. There is a crease in the middle for doing
corners. You want the crease that would fit in the
corner you want that against the drywall, and that's so that the wrinkle there will
get sucked into the crack and not come out the opposite way. Yeah, I know you can almost open the door. Gotta hurry, because my stuff's already drying. So I'm just going to go ahead and cut these
to length. You just stretch it out the width hold your
knife there tear it. Go ahead and do them all, and I'm not going
to overlap them much. So I'm not going to run that one all the way,
we'll just remember the short ones are for the sides. I'm going to take my mud ... gonna get it in those cracks nice and good
... press it in there ... want to fill those voids because that's gonna
make this nice and solid. You don't want all the mud to be on the surface. Press it in there. All right, scrape off the excess. Mix it up in here -- nice and soft. All right, I'm gonna run a little bit of mud
across the top here. Smooth it out. I'm going to take my water bowl and just dip
one of them all the way in, now it's just it's just wet on all sides, and put it on
here, and I'm going to find my crack. It's right there. Drywall knife -- smooth it out. Clean it clean it every time. Just smooth it out, clean it, smooth it out
this way, clean it. All right, now we'll do the bottom. All the way, both sides, make sure the dimple
is going into the wall behind the crack. I want to make sure that mud gets all the
way under the paper. You know if it's missing anywhere obviously
the paper's not going to stick, so when I squeeze this out I want to know there's mud
underneath all of that paper. Let's move it out, scrape off the excess. Now some people when they make their holes
they actually use like -- I actually should have run that the whole way, I didn't realize
that one wasn't going to cover, but we'll just show you how to work around that, we'll
just just make another little patch -- some people like to take a big round hole-saw to
make all these holes, but I'll just tell you, it's a lot harder to patch a round hole than
it is a square hole so I prefer to make square holes. You can do this after the fact, so let's go
ahead and make this one longer, so we know it overlaps. Get some mud on there. Doesn't have to be exactly in the crack. You just want to know you're not missing the
crack. Clean, scrape. Clean up a little bit here so the edges don't
dry. Now let's fix these right here. Just really quick, we'll just do a couple
little patches. I'm just going to tear off two little pieces,
just enough to cover those. I'm just going to show you, you know, there
are no mistakes. It's like Bob Ross, you know? Happy little accidents or whatever. As long as you're getting mud under there,
you're good. So, clean it. Now it would be more ideal to have done that
with one piece of paper so that we didn't have all this build up right here, because that might show through, and we're
going to have to float that a little higher, but you know what, I want to show you I don't
care, it's not that big of a deal, and mudding is
fun. Now some people clean this up like this and
just let this dry before they do anything else, but I like to go ahead and top-coat
it. Now I usually do this with a six inch knife,
which I have on standby here so I'm just going to go ahead and lay that on there with this knife. I'm going to grab my six -- I really love
these Goldblatt stainless steel taping knives -- and we're going to -- this is called "tapering"
the edge -- so I'm pressing in to bend this knife, so that I can make this edge not have any hard edges. It's all going to be soft which will make
it easier to sand in the long run. And then I'm gonna lightly go over this, lightly again. You know I'm pretty fussy with this stuff,
so I'm gonna overdo it. Now we'll go ahead and leave it like that,
and we'll come back and do another coat. Let's go ahead and work on the ceiling before
this cures. I only have like five more minutes on this. Time for you to be in time-lapse. Now I actually had to make some new to finish that up, up there
at the top, because it started kicking off, and this, even though it looks wet, it's um
-- well that's a little wet right there but that's pretty stiff -- we're gonna go ahead
and try to build this out a little bit more with what we got left here. I don't have much, in fact I ran my bag out. I'm just going to taper this. Nice and smooth, and we'll leave that. One more coat should do it, and then we'll
sand. Whipped up another batch of 20 minute icing. You can see about the consistency. It's pretty stiff. It holds together but it will run where it's
too thick, kind of like whipped icing. Anyways this has dried overnight and you can
see you can almost sand it and it'd probably look okay. So that's what? Just two coats. That's with the taping coat on which we immediately
applied another coat, and so this will be the third coat. Scrape off my edges here. Lay that on. You can see I didn't mix it that well, but
it's okay, we can mix it on the wall. Clean my trowel off -- clean my knife off
I should say. I'm going to press in I'm going to go to the top or bottom, I'm
going to press in on one side of the knife here so it flexes, and I'm going to come down
taper the edge. Go across the bottom. Go up this side. The top actually looks pretty good I don't
think I need to taper that. Skim this off. Very lightly, just very light pressure on
here. You can see I bumped the thermostat there
and it made a little jog, but it's okay. Very light. Got a little dimple there. What we'll do is we'll just go back and do
this again one more time. Load my knife. Scrape the edges. Get it on there. Ice that cake. Squeeze those bubbles out. A booger there. Just messed that up. Taper that edge. I probably could have done without tapering
that edge. Let's bring that back in. I actually like how that looks, so I'm not
going to taper that edge. I'm going to use that edge, and taper the
bottom, the top, and that looks pretty good. Now let's do the ceiling. Load up my knife, scrape the edges, ice the cake. I like to go in multiple directions to kind
of squeeze all the bubbles out. Press on one side of the knife, feather that
edge, other side, feather that edge. With light pressure, go down the middle. I'm going to leave that on there to fill any
gaps. I'm just going to do light pressure again
over here. And that is it. Now we'll move on to this one load up my knife
and scrape the edges a little bit. We'll go this way this time. This direction, that direction, this direction,
oh yeah, nice and smooth. Taper this edge, taper this edge. Now I'm going to start at this side and go
lightly down the middle, lightly down the middle, lightly down the middle. Here's where the two join up right there. Do that right there. That's it. It's a little better over there. All right, look at that. That is ready for sanding. That is nice and smooth. It'll just take a light sanding with a sponge,
as will this. So as you can see we haven't even touched
it with sandpaper yet. All we did was took the edge of a six inch
knife and scraped it flat, and you know you could paint this and get away with it. But I'm just going to go ahead with a little
bit of sandpaper and soften it up a little bit. Won't even take much, so I'm not gonna have
to time-lapse it. That's it right there. Smoother than the rest of the wall. That's how you patch drywall after cutting
it out to run some cable through it. With a little practice someone could easily
cut all those holes out run the cable patch the holes all in one day. They would have to come back the next day
for a sanding, but they could get all three coats on there in one day especially, if they
use 20 minute or five minute patching compound. Anyway, mudding is fun, so if you haven't
had a chance to do some mudding, get you a bucket of mud and just practice smearing it
on scraping it off smearing it on scraping it off, feathering the edges, tapering the
edges, smoothing. I mean it's like it's like doing pottery it's
relaxing it's therapeutic. Just the smell of the mud, the feel of icing
the cake, watching it spread out, there's just something, you know, ASMR I guess, about
it. Anyway, thanks for watching and I hope to
see you all in the next one.
