The old apartment building on Maple Street taught me a lesson about pre-wiring

Back in 2003 I was running cable through this 1920s building downtown, and the plaster and lathe walls were so brittle they just crumbled when I tried to fish lines through... I spent three hours patching holes for every five minutes of actual wiring. Has anyone else run into old buildings that forced you to totally change your installation method?

2 comments

2 Comments

wendy727d ago

Oh man, right on. But I gotta say, plaster and lathe is a whole different beast from drywall. See, drywall you can usually patch pretty clean. Plaster though, that stuff is like working with ancient pottery that's already cracked. You breathe on it wrong and it crumbles. I've had jobs where I had to abandon half my planned routes and just run everything along the baseboards because the walls were so fragile. It's not even about fixing old problems, it's more like the building itself is telling you "nope, you're going the long way around.

zara_hill467d ago

Man, isn't it always the way though? You think you're just running a cable and suddenly you're a drywall expert for half the day. It's like nothing in life ever goes as smooth as you plan it, you always gotta fix three old problems before you can even start the new one.