One thing we wanted to do differently in this house compared to our last was to have a functioning TV in the master bedroom.
We technically had a TV in the previous master for a short time, but we never hooked it up to a DVD player or added a second set-top box. I’m not even sure it was ever plugged in.
We’re not diehard proponents of bedroom TVs (it’s a debated topic), but as two people who often stay in “blog mode” at night, we figured a TV could help us stop working on laptops in bed. To encourage unplugging from work, we ordered two set-top boxes for this house. One step closer to relaxing, right?
Despite that, the bedroom TV still wasn’t hooked up at first. When the alarm system required a phone line, we scheduled a pre-move installation of cable, phone, and internet. Before moving in all our furniture we weren’t sure where we wanted the cable jack upstairs, and the technician left suggesting I could install the jack myself later. Whether persuasive or just in a hurry, he left me with the choice. That left us with another non-working bedroom TV for a while—until we at least connected the Blu-ray player for occasional weekend movies.
I’d never run wiring through walls before, so I wasn’t sure how it would go. The goal was simple: snake coax from an existing splitter in the attic, down through the wall, and out a new jack in the bedroom. With the cable technician’s basic guidance and a few instructional videos, I felt brave enough to get started.
First I located the right wall in the attic. I followed a visible electrical wire and found a phone line that led to the bedroom jack. Seeing those wires run through the attic floor gave me confidence I was over the correct stud and ready to drill.
I had trouble converting measurements between the bedroom drywall and the exposed attic rafters, so I used fixed reference points instead. I could see the phone jack cable path in the attic, which helped me estimate where to drill.
In the bedroom I cut a small access hole with a jab saw where I wanted the new jack to sit. Then I went into the attic and drilled a hole through the top plate, hoping the hole aligned with the drywall opening below.
To route the cable I used glow rods from the hardware store—flexible fiberglass poles that slip through insulation and bend around corners. They glow in the dark, which is helpful when working inside walls.
I pushed a glow rod through the attic into the wall cavity until I felt it reach the bottom plate. My first attempt missed by a few inches—my holes ended up just on opposite sides of the same stud—so I drilled a couple more holes until the glow rod appeared in the bedroom opening. That was a satisfying moment.
At first I forgot to attach the coax to the rod, so I pulled it back out, taped the cable to the rod, and snaked it through to the bedroom. After pulling the rod out I was left with the coax ready to connect.
I installed a simple coax wall plate I picked up at the store. The coax screws into the plate’s backside like it would into a cable box, and the plate screws cleanly to the drywall. It’s not perfectly polished, but it’s far better than a cable sticking up through a random floorboard as we’ve sometimes lived with before.
In the attic I connected the cable to the existing splitter that had previously fed another room. I’d already removed the old hookup when we installed new hardwood flooring prior to moving in.
In theory we were ready to watch cable in the bedroom. Verizon, however, required a bit more troubleshooting. After swapping set-top boxes and resolving a regional glitch, the system was finally working. A few support calls and a couple of trips later, we had multi-room DVR service working so recordings made downstairs can be viewed upstairs.
Yes, the wall jack ended up beside the existing outlet rather than hidden behind the dresser. We plan to swap the dresser for a wider piece eventually, so keeping the jack clustered with the other outlets made sense. It keeps the visible wiring in one place that will soon be covered by furniture.
All told, the install cost about $40 in materials and took an hour or two of hands-on work, plus time spent with support resolving the DVR issue. For a first attempt at in-wall wiring, it was a satisfying and practical DIY project that saved us the technician fee.
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