This Outlet Sucks

So this is the hallway in my house.

It's central to the three bedrooms as well as one of the bathrooms, so it would make the perfect place to plug in a vacuum cleaner while I'm tidying up. Unfortunately, as you might be able to tell, there is no outlet here to plug into.

However, on just the other side of the wall, there is an outlet. It's not very convenient to use, though, as it's hiding behind where I park all my bikes. As such, the only thing that's ever plugged in here is the base station for my wireless doorbell.

So the goal here today is to tap into this outlet and extend it to the other side of the wall. Naturally, this starts with shutting off the power. And, as per usual, once I've figured out which breaker it's on, I add a label to save some time and headache later.

Then we can safely pull out the outlet and observe the truly masterful job that the original builders did when they cut the drywall opening for the box.

They sure don't make 'em like they used to.

For whatever reason, all the wiring in this house is cut super short in the boxes and the outlets are tagged on with pigtails. This is especially annoying with the grounds, which don't even reach all the way out of the box, and are usually tied together with a wire nut that only barely grips all of the conductors. I'll be replacing that wire nut with a push-in connector, as there's no way I'm going to be wrangling 4 wires into a wire nut when two of them are that short.

Anyway, this box needs an extra hole in it for the new romex to go through, so let's try using a spade bit. My hope is that the outer teeth will gently scrape away at the bakelite and carve out a nice round hole.

And yeah that went about as well as you were expecting. It chipped out immediately.

So instead, let's try twist drills. We'll start at 5/16.

And then go up the sizes to half inch.

Ok, that's much better. An actual round hole instead of just shattered bakelite.

Now we'll do some careful measuring so that the new box lands about a half inch to the left of the old box.

Pre-drilling the corners makes it much easier to get the drywall saw started.

And peek-a-boo, there's the backside of the old box.

You know, looking at it from this side, I'm pretty sure they just scored the paper on the front side and knocked the middle out with a hammer when they made the opening for this box.

Anyway, the new box fits perfectly, because I actually care about the quality of my work.

And fishing the romex through the wall is about as trivial as you'd expect.

Then we just install the new outlet in the usual manner.

And, hmm. I'm gonna need to clean up that drywall dust. Better go find an extension cord so I can plug in my vacuum...

And of course terminating the other side in the existing box was the usual straightforward job as well. Now I have an outlet here that's conveniently located for any time I want to plug something in near these rooms.