That one attic job that turned into a 4 hour nightmare over a single cable drop

I got a call to run a new coax line for a customer's home office in an old Victorian house here in Portland. Looked simple on the walkthrough, maybe 45 minutes tops. Got up in the attic and found the previous installer had tangled all the lines with no slack and stapled them to the joists every 6 inches. Took me 3 hours just to free up a path and snake the new line through 4 different crawl spaces without breaking any existing connections. Anyone else run into attics that look like a rat's nest of old wiring?

3 comments

3 Comments

wendysanchez13d ago

Oh man, "rat's nest of old wiring" is putting it mildly. I had almost the exact same thing happen in a house near Hawthorne, old 1910s craftsman. The previous guy had literally used like a thousand staples every few inches and then just left a foot of slack at the end, so every time you touch one cable, three others go tight. I spent almost 2.5 hours just trying to pull a simple phone line through because everything was tangled and glued to the joists with some kind of old adhesive. Did you end up having to cut and re-terminate any of the old lines? Because I swear every time I freed one, I heard a crack and just prayed it wasn't someone's internet dropping.

blair_martin13d ago

Actually, phone lines wouldn't drop internet, they're totally separate from DSL.

olivia39813d ago

Every time I hear that crack sound I just close my eyes and pretend I'm a bomb disposal guy in a movie. Did a similar job in an old house near Sellwood last year and found phone wires literally wrapped around pipe insulation with what looked like tar. Had to cut and re-terminate three of them because the old ends were basically petrified. At that point I just labeled the ones I chopped "RIP" and hoped nobody was still using a landline.