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Vent: Hit 5000 feet of wire pulled in a single house job yesterday
Looked at the spool count at the end of the day and it just hit me. We were doing a full retrofit on a huge old place in the historic district, three floors plus a finished attic. The owner wanted everything hardwired, no wireless sensors, and we had to run fresh lines for every window and door contact, plus motion detectors and glass breaks. My arms are still sore from fishing through those plaster walls and old fire blocks. It took two of us three full days just for the wire runs. Makes you miss the simpler jobs sometimes, where a wireless kit would have done the trick in half the time. Anyone else get a retrofit where the client's specs just blew your normal numbers out of the water?
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blairwhite5mo ago
Had a 7000 foot job on a Victorian last fall. Client wanted Cat6 to every room and coax for old school cable boxes. We used a flexible drill bit extension, the kind that snakes through fire blocks. Saved our backs. Also mapped every run on a floor plan first to avoid crossing paths. Still took a week.
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eva_henderson225mo ago
How much extra time do you think mapping everything out first actually saved? I heard that step can make or break a job in an old house.
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noahbaker4mo ago
I saw a thread on a home building forum where a guy said mapping saved him like 8 hours on a single floor of a 1920s craftsman. He had to dodge all these weird diagonal studs and old knob and tube wiring the homeowner missed. @eva_henderson22, if you don't map first, you end up drilling blind and hitting something weird, then spending an hour patching drywall you just mangled. That flexible drill bit extension was a lifesaver for me too on a similar job, but only because I knew exactly where to point it from the map. Without that step, you can turn a two-day job into a whole week of headaches real fast.
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