Hey, I'm Getting Pretty Good at This!

So here's the challenge. You need to push an electrical wire through a 1-inch diameter hole. The hole is 10 feet away. And it's in another room. And you can't even see it.

Ready... start! I'll wait.

That was the task today. We wanted to run some new electrical wiring to our second-floor parlor, but there's no way to route the wire up to that room without damaging the walls. We've been thinking about this problem off and on for years, before finally deciding that we had two options. Either we run the wiring on the outside of the house (in weatherproof conduit, obviously), or we sneak it through the hollow wall that holds the pocket doors. We went for Plan B.

The pocket doors on the first floor run underneath the room we want to re-wire, so it should be possible to run the wire up through that wall and pop out through the ceiling/floor. Better yet, there's a closet on the second floor directly above the pocket doors, which allows us to hide the wiring in the back of the closet rather than having to expose an ugly junction box somewhere. Perfect.

That's the easy part. The hard part is actually making it happen. For starters, we wanted to be absolutely sure that the closet really was directly above the pocket doors. No use in drilling down through the floor if it just comes out in the ceiling downstairs. So we measured everything, checked twice, and overlaid the floor plans to make sure everything lined up as expected. "Measure twice, cut once."

Once we were 85% satisfied that we knew what we were doing, we drilled down through the closet floor until the drill bit hit air. Then it was time to run downstairs and look for unfamiliar holes in the ceiling. No holes? Splendid. Let's keep going.

Then we fed the electrical wire (12/3 Romex, if you're into that kind of thing) down through the closet floor, letting gravity ease it downward through the hollow wall.  We had to pull the heavy pocket door entirely out of its pocket and shine a flashlight into the gap to see if the wire was going where we wanted. Yup -- bright yellow Romex coiling up at the bottom. So far, so good.

Now for the fun part. Time to drill a second hole in the first-floor floor so the wire can get under the house and into the crawlspace. Oh, and one other thing: the wire can't foul the pocket door as it moves. so it has to be pushed all the way to the far end of the narrow pocket, more than 3 feet back.

There's no way to drill a hole by reaching into the door pocket -- I can't even fit my hand in there -- and there's certainly no way to reach 3 feet back. The only way to drill the second hole is to work from the bottom up. Time to get under the house.

Using plumbing lines as landmarks, I marked where the second hole should go. Grab a drill, cross my fingers, and drill straight upwards through the floor into our living room. Crawl out from under the house, look around nervously for sawdust on the hardwood floors... Nope. No reason to panic just yet.

But where's my hole? It's not in the middle of the living room, which is good, but I can't see it in the pocket wall, either. Duh, it's under all the dust and debris and junk that have accumulated there over 125 years. Time to crawl back under the house and poke a stiff wire with bright red insulation up through the hole as a marker. Topside again, I can just see the red wire poking up though the new hole in the back of the pocket wall. Hooray!

Okay, so I've got two holes, one in the floor and one in the ceiling about 10 feet above it. And a loose coil of wire dangling down from the upper hole in the back on an inaccessible pocket wall. How to coax that wire to magically jump through the lower hole?

I could go back upstairs to the second-floor closet and wiggle the wire, hoping to get lucky. I could try to fashion some sort of 3-foot-long grabber arm and snatch the wire and aim it through the hole, like a carnival game. I could drink more beer...

Aha! Let's go back under the house and push some more of that red telltale wire up through the hole until it's long enough that I can reach into the pocket wall with a 3-foot stick and grab it. Then go upstairs and feed some more yellow Romex down through the upper hole so that I can grab it, too. Now tape the two wires together. Crawl back under the house, pull on the red wire and hope really hard that it pulls the yellow Romex through the hole after itself without snagging on anything.

Got it first time. Piece of cake. Don't know why I was ever worried.