I always end up green with envy that people seem to have pre-existing conduits in their walls for running new cables. There's no way, in my old house, of doing this without some invasive smashing in to walls.
Doing basic drywall and paint isn’t rocket science, but getting a professional level fit and finish actually takes a lot of practice and experience. It’s also a completely different experience when you’re trying to match old specialty paints from a previous homeowner, blending repairs to match the wall texture, and other complexities that don’t show up in those basic YT videos. If you’re in a situation with untextured walls, known paint colors, simple repairs, and a forgiving eye, then it’s really not bad, but the complexities can add up quickly.
Even in the best cases, cutting into drywall all across the house to pull wire would be a project I’d try to avoid at all costs in an occupied home. The fast path still requires multiple days to go through all of the drying and re-application cycles to build up all the right layers, not to mention dust control to keep that fine dust out of everything you own.
Certainly, if you're looking for perfectly smooth walls, then you're never going to be happy regardless. My place is Santa Fe, which is perfect... it is supposed to be messy. But this is a place built in the 40's... nothing is perfect. Doing something perfectly would stand out even more.
If you want old paints to match, then just paint the whole wall. That's easier and probably the right solution anyway.
A good feathering job saves a ton of wasted sanding effort and drywall dust. When I ask GCs and tradespeople which job they would would never do themselves, drywall is far and away the most common answer. It’s the only job I regret doing myself.
Electrician is the answer I usually get, largely because if you do electricity wrong, you can kill yourself or burn down the house.
Since the house is old, it is plywood floors and they aren't even enough for vinyl. Going to have to learn how to fix that too. From what I can tell, it is basically just mud like on the walls... but portland cement on the floor.
I'm glad you had such an easy time of it, but cutting, patching, and matching is a pain in most homes I've done it in. And don't even get me started on lath and plaster.
Doing it down to the studs and all at once is definitely the easier way to do it. Small patches and piecework suck, but if you’re living in it, especially with others, you don’t always get a say in the matter.
Used this technique to rip out and then match a ceiling in a bathroom, and also to patch up work after some HVAC dudes blew part of a wall out for mini splits.
It was tough to learn as there is a knack, but paid off. Having good hand eye coordination pays off in many ways.
The most important part was learning from an experienced person: "No wall on earth is perfectly flat, you just want it to look flat." Good advice, especially in a town (Philly) where there are old houses with not a square corner in the whole place. :)
When the walls are off in the house is the best time to get anything done. Sometimes I don't even want to put the walls back on- for example, an unfinished garage with exposed studs is very convenient.
Every town in America has at least one, if not several Home Depot’s, Lowe’s, OSH’s, etc. and at least 75-90% of the traffic at any given time is private home owners, not contractors. Americans do a LOT of DIY.
There isn’t any real comparison anywhere else I’ve been able to find, and I’ve looked. Not as much in France, but Germany, Switzerland, Italy, India, Bulgaria (closest to having something like that), Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, etc.
Some areas where plywood would be preferrable for durability, like a garage, are often prohibited from using something other than sheetrock due to the fire risk. Probably not a big deal unless you have entire walls of it.
I'm not sure whether older houses are more maintainable by default, or just once you have rocked over some threshold of continuous occupancy, there there are sufficient layers of repair and rework that you just stop worrying about (for example) sawing through a floorboard. While I didn't have to mess with the walls, if I had, I'd just have torn down the existing plaster and redone it, like you say it's not that big of a deal
I've started plastering a few of my walls and after wasting a couple days doing a few square meters ended up hiring a couple guys to do the rest of the house. There is just no comparison in value.
Of course if I do something enough I can get good at it, the point of hiring someone is because I am not going to do it enough to get good at it.
Highly recommend Vancouver Carpenter on youtube, if you do want to go down that rabbit hole.
I wouldn't call this cheap :-)
Guess how much they make if you don’t pay them?
It’s better for everyone if someone who can make more money per hour uses that higher earning power to offload lower income tasks to people in those jobs.
The view I replied to implied it would be gross to pay someone to make your meal because it’s cheap.
Doing small repairs is easy enough that everyone should at least know the concepts involved.
It takes a lot of practice to be smooth enough at doing it to have a nice result over any large area before the concrete sets. It’s not the type of thing that benefits from going ‘hmm, maybe I should do it this way’ after you’ve started.
Also, it’s much, much easier to do as a small crew - easily 3-5x more productivity per person. Same as drywall. It’s not easy to do as a solo worker, even if you know the tricks.
In my very limited experience, many textures are often harder to make look right than flat surfaces. I think I am sensitive to texture variation, because with textures I notice mistakes and I often notice where alterations have been made.
Either way, your Santa Fe look is irrelevant to the topic of fixing problems in walls when they are not textured like yours.
Plaster walls on wood studs is a lot harder, and plaster over brick or concrete is impossible.
I don't own a house and have never owned a house. This will probably sound stupid and I am sorry if this is something obvious.
Is it that my spouse will leave me or my parents will disown me if I run a conduit just hanging on a wall? What is this obsession with hiding all wiring within the drywall? What am I missing here?
It could be something as simple as a conduit like https://i.imgur.com/6X5of8Y.png
Not that I have a leg to stand on because I still can't afford to buy a home outright (and at current rate, never will). I live in an apartment and I don't make any changes to it. I cannot even imagine doing something simple like drill a hole on the door for a doorbell. So, I am definitely hypocritical when I say this. Maybe I am just being salty as a non-home owner. I feel like all of this comes from treating our homes as some kind of liquid asset that we must keep in pristine condition at all times so we can stage it and sell it at a moment's notice.
If you own your own home, why not live in your home like you own your home? Run that conduit across all the walls (and through inside door frames or something like that if you must). If not, do you really own your own home? Why not just live with housing insecurity like I do?
Edit: spelling
To me it just feels good to wake up in a visually simple environment with things out of sight. It feels like magic, in a good way, to be surrounded by performant, reliable and useful technology but to be able to see almost none of it. And I have an automatic negative reaction to visual clutter or conspicuous machinery in my house.
I don't see anything wrong with your way of thinking. I can't easily change how I feel about it and I see no reason why either of us should have to.
Edit: this makes me think about sci-fi spaceships. Battlestar Galactica vs. the Heart of Gold from Hitchhiker's Guide. One has its conduits and controls run every which way and the other is minimalist to a fault. I like them both but would definitely prefer to wake up every morning in the latter!
Also, I would say writing bad code makes the code very inaccessible...just like burying important infrastructure in a wall.
Did that water leak last year cause mild growth in the wall? Don't know without some demolition! Want to upgrade your piping or electrical? Gotta destroy some wall, hooray, and then do more work to hide it again. Lunacy.
One of the apartments I looked at recently had this really annoying buzz in the kitchen, turned out it was a transformer that the previous owner plastered in. Definitely a big minus for me.
In my current apartment all cabling and piping is outside the walls because it was built before electricity was everywhere and I find it really handy <3. If the look bothers you it's not for you obviously but I don't think it's inherently worse.
Good code also doesn't need to "look pretty", it needs to be correct, and maintainable. Preferably maintainable by a less skilled developer with less domain knowledge. Following that logic, the code that follows the pattern of "highly visible and obvious", like the conduit, is probably the better code.
All that being said, I prefer simple walls, with conduit hidden inside it. I'm just happy to admit that what I like it not universal, and that other have their own styles.
Wiremold 500 surface raceway is what I would recommend, it’s a basic surface raceway for electrical conductors or cables: https://www.legrand.us/wire-and-cable-management/raceway-and...
There are probably residential raceways that blend in better, but I’m not familiar with residential construction.
There are plenty of ways to get a cable from point A to point B inside of a wall, particularly if you have a single story home with an unfinished attic and basement. A spade drill bit, a fish tape, and a multitool/rotozip can get a cable pretty much anywhere if you can drill a hole into the wall cavity from above or below.
If I walked into a listing and saw surface raceway everywhere, I’d only bid what I was comfortable paying leaving room for a gut rehab. It’s evidence of a high level of DGAF at a minimum and likely isn’t the only place that corners were cut.
My aesthetic requirements are basically zero (to the dismay of my partner indeed; we meet in the middle) but I do want to be able to practically use the apartment still.
I have made many such holes in door frames for passing Ethernet cables or TV coaxial cables.
When you do not want to touch the walls, such cables can be routed on the edges between walls and floor and they can be masked by a cover having the wall color, to be invisible, except where passing through a door frame.
At least in Europe where I live, I have not seen any walls through which you can make clean holes with high probability. Almost always there is some small damage, which must be repaired, e.g. by filling with plaster and/or repainting. In most cases you also need a percussion drill machine, not just a simple drill machine. Here most walls are made either of concrete or of bricks.
So at least in the kinds of walls that I have seen, passing a cable through a wall requires more time, more diverse skills and a larger set of tools and materials than passing a cable through a door frame, which requires only that you have and know how to handle a drill machine and a cable crimping tool.
While common outside the US, most of it in newer constructions tends to be light concrete which is trivial to drill. But even 40MPa concrete is fine with an SDS, rent one if you don't wish to spend money on. In short drilling through outer walls is not difficult either.
Most interior doors have a gap between the bottom of the door and the top of the floor, and you can cable in the gap if you don't mind the look. If the threshold is carpetted, you can often squish the wire into the seam where the carpet meets the door frame.
You can get one, maybe two, runs into a room that way, so don't put your central switch in a room like that, and if you need more than one drop in a room, put a switch in the room.
This seems like you are missing the point. The REASON that having a conduit hanging on the wall lowers the home value is because it looks bad and ruins the aesthetics… for both the current home owner and a future home owner. The reason the person buying the house would pay less is the same reason me, the current home owner, doesn’t want it… it looks bad.
I understand that some people don’t care about aesthetics at all (I am probably closer to that end of the spectrum than most), but you also have to realize that people care about how their home looks for more reasons than just resale value. Do you think the whole world only makes their houses look nice in case they want to sell?
Well, you aren’t wrong. This is exactly the thinking behind that.
The other response is correct that it’s nicer to have it all covered up though. I guess it comes down to a bit of perfectionism. If I stick everything on the walls I will always feel like there is work left to do.
That said, our living room is still (3 years in) a mess of (nice, not industrial) on-wall conduits.
Or they just run cable along the walls.
Many garages will be as you describe.
For this house, the easiest way to pull wires from one end of the house to another (after the original construction) is to first go down into the crawl space, cross horizontally there, then go up again.
easy, skip the decoration
I saw a video where someone was doing this and they used little plastic bend guides that were painted trim color.. not perfect but also not as noticeable as I would have thought.
There are so many parts of it that were "over engineered" for a house 50 years ago that are "oh, that's convenient" now.
If I built a home I'd add conduit, but that's an extremely niche idea.
[1] similar to https://www.kleintools.com/catalog/flex-bit-accessories/flex...
Similar to: https://www.finehomebuilding.com/project-guides/wiring/runni...
There are some considerations if it's a firewall or an insulated wall, but it can be really nice.
The US can add it but it’s an extra cost and so rarely done.
If you don't have an initial wire installed you can use a magnet kit with a specific wire to pull it through the conduit.(e.g youtube "magnepull"). A camera small comes in handy as well.
If you need to pull wires through the ceiling and you already have recessed lights you can use their wires to pull your new wire.
Unfortunately, in my experience of 6 or 7 new builds in the last 15 years or so, coaxial cables are usually staples to the studs and useless for this purpose.
Well, that's part of the fun/job. Usually you end-up with a few holes as well so you try to get hold of anything that helps you, "one inch" at a time.
As always, the easy way to deal with this is to let someone else do the job(hire a pro/custom installer).
The biggest skill is you have to hold your jaw just right when you do it. Then, it’s a piece of cake.
I know that Verizon also has fiber with a stiffer jacket that they can push through conduit a pretty good distance. I know this because I helped the Verizon installer run FIOS at my daughter's apartment in a building that was over 100 years old. The conduit had a crimp in it so it took the two of us a while to get past that.
I had my house wired up with 30 Cat 6 drops (3 being in-ceiling for AP's) and in the end it was simpler to go up to the loft (2 story house) and come down that way, with all of the cables then being bundled up and coming down through a built-in-wardrobe into the garage below.
It required a bit of patching here and there where a small chase had to be chisseled out to get around a cable going through a patch of plaster used for dot and dab (technique to quickly plasterboard/drywall onto brick), but with conduit it would have been a much simpler job.
I hired an electrician to drill the holes for me earlier this year and it took him over 10 minutes per hole to get through the 60cm (2ft) reinforced concrete slab for running cables between two floors.
This is an opportunity - you might want to brainstorm X.
anything in the kitchen (before you start depending on it for food and/or fill the fridge with perishable stuff)
mindfully adding specific storage. Could be the difference between moving in and piling all your stuff in random places.
related: garage - before it becomes the "catch all" for unresolved boxes of stuff you move with. A friend said overpaying closetworld for cabinets around the perimeter of his garage was money well spent.
adding electrical outlets, switches, etc
and yeah, cat5 or fiber
I live in a split level. The company I hired flat out refused to do a cat6 drop to my upstairs office, after spending nearly 40 minutes getting wire up a single story.