miamicanes
Active Member
OK, I've now come almost full circle. My original plan (before I got physical possession of my new house and found out what horrors actually await behind the walls) was to bore holes for 4 conduits between the first and second floors, and run wires for everything behind the drywall. Then I found out that actually drilling the holes as a DIY project will be damn near impossible, and discovered that 90% of the walls have only a 3/4" gap between the drywall and concrete wall. And when I finally got past THAT obstacle, I discovered that what little gap there is is mostly filled with expanding liquid foam, so the only truly clear path I still have available to me is behind the baseboards at floor level. Sigh. So much for my conduit-filled dreams of a fully-wired home. At least, at this point (when paying several thousand dollars to have it done professionally is completely out of the question). 
That leaves two possibilities for my alarm: wireless (for the sensors not located near an old phone jack whose wiring is being repurposed as a RS-485 control bus for the M1G), and conduit buried in the drywall itself (then patched over). Both of which have problems of their own:
* My motion sensors (Bosch 820i), glassbreak sensors (Ademco 1625), and glass shock sensors (Rokonet Shocktec) all need 12v. So even if I buy a bunch of DW-319 wireless door/window sensors just so I can repurpose their transmitters for the motion, glassbreak and shock sensors... I still need to get 12v to them somehow.
* The walls in the living room are covered with textured & painted wallpaper. If I cut any holes in the drywall, I'm basically going to have to strip off the wallpaper, re-texture the walls with knock-down texture, and repaint the living room, because there's no way to fix the wallpaper cuts after the fact.
At the moment, I'm leaning towards the second option... saying 'f**k it', destroying the living room walls, and repainting them after I've patched the channels cut in them for the rectangular conduit (it looks like Wiremold's plastic wiring channels will do the job, even if they're officially intended for surface wiring). Mainly, because I'm going to have to repaint the living room eventually anyway, and I'm otherwise just stalling the inevitable. But that leaves one more challenge -- how the HELL do you remove 20+ year old painted-over textured wallpaper that's almost certainly fused to the drywall's surface paper without destroying the drywall in the process? If I'm talking about two walls (one that's 18x8, and one that's 15x8), would the cost of the tools and supplies I'd need to strip it approach or exceed the cost of just paying someone to do it?
God, I'm so frustrated. I've been in my new house for almost a week, and have almost nothing to show for it because the damn wiring problem has dominated almost all of my time (and induced me to burn several hundred dollars at Home Depot and Lowe's on tools and supplies after hitting dead end after dead end)
That leaves two possibilities for my alarm: wireless (for the sensors not located near an old phone jack whose wiring is being repurposed as a RS-485 control bus for the M1G), and conduit buried in the drywall itself (then patched over). Both of which have problems of their own:
* My motion sensors (Bosch 820i), glassbreak sensors (Ademco 1625), and glass shock sensors (Rokonet Shocktec) all need 12v. So even if I buy a bunch of DW-319 wireless door/window sensors just so I can repurpose their transmitters for the motion, glassbreak and shock sensors... I still need to get 12v to them somehow.
* The walls in the living room are covered with textured & painted wallpaper. If I cut any holes in the drywall, I'm basically going to have to strip off the wallpaper, re-texture the walls with knock-down texture, and repaint the living room, because there's no way to fix the wallpaper cuts after the fact.
At the moment, I'm leaning towards the second option... saying 'f**k it', destroying the living room walls, and repainting them after I've patched the channels cut in them for the rectangular conduit (it looks like Wiremold's plastic wiring channels will do the job, even if they're officially intended for surface wiring). Mainly, because I'm going to have to repaint the living room eventually anyway, and I'm otherwise just stalling the inevitable. But that leaves one more challenge -- how the HELL do you remove 20+ year old painted-over textured wallpaper that's almost certainly fused to the drywall's surface paper without destroying the drywall in the process? If I'm talking about two walls (one that's 18x8, and one that's 15x8), would the cost of the tools and supplies I'd need to strip it approach or exceed the cost of just paying someone to do it?
God, I'm so frustrated. I've been in my new house for almost a week, and have almost nothing to show for it because the damn wiring problem has dominated almost all of my time (and induced me to burn several hundred dollars at Home Depot and Lowe's on tools and supplies after hitting dead end after dead end)
