When we left off, the pass-through was looking like this:

The actual window was done, but as you can see, we had a lot of rewiring to do before we could frame it out. Seven wires ran down the middle of the hole. Seven! Each one inside its own tube. Two of those were electrical – one for the kitchen and another one for the living room. Two more were for the “normal” TV connection, again, one for the living room and another one for the kitchen. An additional two were for cable TV, in the kitchen and in the living room. The seventh and last one was for a phone land line in the kitchen.

And you’re probably wondering why we have so many TV connections. Well, for starters, it’s common in new homes here to have a TV connection in all bedrooms, the living room and the kitchen. Plus our cable provider usually sets up the installation in new homes too while they are building them (good marketing strategy, I guess. Since you already have it set up you’re more likely to go with them instead of a competitor). Lastly, the builders were lazy and decided to put the TV connection on the dining side of the living room instead of the living side. Even though in their suggested floor plan the TV is where we have it (i.e. on the other side of the room). So, long story short: we have four TV connections in the living room (the two we actually use and the two that were there from the beginning) and two more in the kitchen (plus the ones in the bedroom, hah).

Out of all those seven wires the ones we actually use are the electrical ones. However, we wanted to keep all the connections in case we ever sell the apartment and the new owners want to change the layout of the living room/want 1000 TVs/whatever. We just thought, hey, if the connections are here, it’s best if we can keep them. That meant we had to redo all seven wires.

Since our walls are made of brick, we decided to “empty” the contents of the brick to fit the wires inside them:

Now’s a good time to mention that the placement of the outlets in the kitchen (the square above) was strategical – they end right where the tile ends, to make cutting the tile easier. I’ll detail this in another post though.

We made sure the new tubes would fit inside – three on each side of the pass through. The phone landline went inside on the TV tubes because there wasn’t room for a fourth tube on either side.

Once we had room for all the tubes/wires we redid the installation. What we did was remove all the wires (all seven) and cut the tubes right above and below the passthrough. Then we connected new longer tubes (enough to surround the passthrough on the sides) to where we had cut them off. Lastly we put in new wires in all tubes, using one of those cable/wire guides. So basically we redid the whole electrical & TV installation. We didn’t want to cut the electrical wires and join them together because that can cause issues down the line. Plus you can’t cut & join TV cables so we had to redo those anyway.

When the rewiring was done we kept the corrugated tubes in place with tape and loads of cement/spackle.

So that’s where we’re at right now. I’m not going to lie, rewiring was a heck of a job and we certainly didn’t expect seven tubes down the middle of our window when we were opening it up! But it’s done now and it makes the space even more open. Next up: making those rough edges straight. Then we’ll be (almost) ready for trim. It’s coming a long, slowly but surely.

What do you think? Share your opinion in the comments.