How to move an outlet across 4 studs

So let’s face it. Mounting the TV to the wall is not really that difficult. But this project is a little bit different and a little bit more complex. We are going to be moving the electrical outlet to the back of the television and the existing electrical outlet is for studs to the right of where we need the new electrical outlet to go. So now things got a little bit more tricky. But not for Alan at You Do AV. Along with being a reality TV show star on the hit show “wipeout” Allen is a professional at home theater installation.

For maximum results in viewing this video please you in high definition and in full-screen.

Any electrical outlets that you will be touching will need to make sure that they are turned off before doing any work on this project. Safety is your responsibility.  Plug and switch off outlets at the breaker.

Tools needed – electrical outlet tester. (This will make sure that the electricity is turned off) Warning – do not do this hot
(if you’re not sure what Allen means when he says hot he is referring to turning off the electricity at the breaker – it doesn’t feel hot it’s more of the stingy tingling feeling if you get shocked)

Transcript

Hi everybody. I’m Alan from You Do AV. Today, we have a pretty special installation. This is going to be, I’m going to call this one moderate to borderline high difficulty. Okay. This is a tough one. What’s going to happen today is we’re going to do this installation. We’re going to get this TV on the wall. That’s the easy part. We need to get the electrical power behind this TV. We don’t want any wire show and look at this rad installation. We don’t want any wire show and this looks needs to look pro right? So the problem is our electrical outlet needs to go here and we’re going to tie into an electrical outlet that’s over here and it’s, four feet down and four studs away. We need to get, that electrical wire over four studs and up four feet without making any drywall damage. Okay, this is a tough one, but we’re going to give you guys all the tools that you need.

So get buckled up here we go.

Now that our TV has flipped around, we’re gonna go ahead and show you how a TV mount goes on. Now, there are a lot of different types of TV brackets out there, and I’m not gonna pretend like this one is anywhere near like the one that you’re gonna have at your house, but the instructions are all pretty much the same. They all follow the same type of order. It’s really simple. There’s always some type of bracket that mounts to the back of the TV. And there’s always some type of bracket that mounts to the wall.

And then it always comes with some variety of hardware. Now yours are probably gonna come with a pretty big bag of hardware. Don’t worry. You’re not gonna use ’em all. You’re gonna pick the size that fits your TV. Then you can take the rest to recycle. ’em donate ’em to cherry throw ’em in the trash. You can, okay. Now your TV is gonna say, just like my Mount, that we provided is probably gonna say universal mounting bracket, and it should fit most TVs. But for some reason, these companies have decided that they don’t need to send as much hardware as they used to. And they never, it seems like with I’m using a Samsung TV here, for whatever reason, it seems like they can’t get the Samsung size. Right? And in this case, they haven’t gotten it right. Again, it’s too short by about half an inch.

You guys might run into that. What you guys are gonna have to do is you guys are gonna have to take this bolt. It’s kind of a pain in the butt. I’m sorry, not my fault. Call your local Senator, have them do something about it, but take your local bolt. Go down to your hardware store, match up the size, and get the size that you want. My case. I’m really lucky. I’ve been a pro for a long time. I’m a collector. I happen to have a whole variety of hardware. So for me, I’m just gonna go out and go grab the right size for you guys. Sorry. Anyways. Locate the hardware that you need. Put the arms on. I’m gonna be right back. I’m gonna grab my hardware and we’ll go ahead and Mount these arms on the TV.

Well, that was a fun little adventure. I got my hardware. I’m ready to go ahead and Mount these arms to the TV. It’s pretty simple. Make sure you don’t Mount this backward or sideways upside down. They make it pretty easy. Most of the time I have a little screw on the bottom of my mind. That’s a keeper. That’s gonna end up locking this thing in place once the installation’s done. So the hook I’ve got a hook on mine. The hook obviously goes on the top and then mine has tensioning screws on the side. And you wanna make those go on the face towards the outside so that I can tension it once the TV’s installed. So real simple gonna go ahead and put these arms on the TV. I like to put mine in pretty loose at first. So I have a little adjustment in ’em after I’m done this. This part is not Rocket Surgery. Very simple. Oh, here’s a little tip for you. If you have a slot, I dunno. If you can see these holes are slotted. These are just round holes. If you have a slotted hole, you need a washer. Every slotted hole needs a washer. Remember that?

Okay. Now all of mine now, all my bolts are in loosely

What I like to do is go, even though it’s inside of a hole and you feel like it’s in the same hole and it’s matched up the same and it’s, you know, this should fit nice and cleanly. That’s probably not gonna be the case. You still have like a little bit of play inside that hole. You might have like an eighth of an inch or something like that. An eighth of an inch sounds like nothing. But when you have an eighth of an inch off on a 55 or 60-inch TV, your TV’s gonna look like you’re super crooked. So what I like to do is I put the hardware in loose and then I take the bolts and I just push ’em down and I push ’em down. Once they’re both pushed down all the way down, I tighten it when you tighten these things, okay? Remember we’re not landing, um, jet planes off the back of your TV. It needs to be tight, but you guys should not be murdering these screws, just make sure it’s good and snug. I’ve seen these things stripped out and blown out. And if you strip out the screws in the back of your TV, good luck, good luck trying to fix it. After that, it’s pretty hard. Okay. So once my TV bracket, um, is installed in the back of my TV time for my handy dandy little wall bracket,

I’m gonna set him in place where he’s gonna go.

And this is the part where I start taking measurements, cuz I need to know where I need to Mount this bracket through the wall to get my TV at the optimum hike. If I just randomly throw that sucker on the wall, your TV’s not gonna be anywhere near where you want it to be. So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna take a measurement from the top of the TV, stand to the bottom slot here. That bottom slot is where I’m gonna put my bolts top of the counter bottom slot, take a measurement, 14 and a half inches. Now I’m gonna subtract the distance from the top of the cabinet to the bottom of the TV, cuz my TV’s sitting on a stand right now and that is three and a half inches. So 14 and a half inches minus this gap right here, three and a half inches equals 11 inches.

So I know that I need to Mount this Mount on the wall, 11 inches higher than I want the bottom of the TV. Now I’m gonna go ahead and take some measurements and make sure that I get everything centered all the right height. And we’ll be right back when I take those measurements with a bracket mounted to the back of the TV. It’s time to take some measurements. So as far as your TV is gonna sit left to, right, there’s nothing I can really tell you to help you, uh, with your measurements except for, um, or, um, just find a place where that is most closely linked to where you wanna watch TV and also compromise on how good it looks on the room. Right? So in this case, the center of my TV’s gonna be right there in your guys’ case, it’s gonna end up wherever it ends up. Right? Okay. So I know the center of my TV is here. I’m gonna Mount my wall bracket to the stud to the left of the center and to the right of the center. Got my handy dandy stud finder. Look at that. This is why you don’t trust Stu finders. I know there’s a stud in this area. There it is.

Okay. That’s the one to the left. Let’s go check the one to the right.

Bam. Okay. So I generally don’t just go ahead and start trusting stud finders. They’re always wrong. As you see it didn’t find that stud till like my third pass. So I don’t know if that’s really a stud. Obviously, I can put my head in here and I can peek in that hole to see, but we’re gonna pretend like you guys don’t have that luxury. So what I take is my tweaker screwdriver. This one is one 16th of an inch thick on the tip. It’s tiny. So I’m gonna start making some tiny little holes in the wall to make sure that there’s a stud really there. And what I’m looking for is I want this screwdriver to pass all the way through the wall, on the left of the stud, and all the way through the wall on the right of the stud. Then I know where the center of the stud is. Okay. My stud finder said it was here. Let’s see if it was telling the truth. Yes, there really is a stud there. Okay. So now you’m gonna start going to the right and to the left to find the sides. Bam, my screwdriver’s buried all the way to the handle. I know that’s the right side. So the left side should probably be right about there. That’s it right there. So between that hole and that hole is the center. Look at that my stud finder was dead center. That never happens. Okay. So I went ahead and marked my center line here. Same thing.

There is a stud there. That is the left side.

So the right side should be right about there. Oh, almost so close. Got it. Left side right side. Make a line right in the middle. Bam. All right. I know I’m gonna hit that stud. I know I’m gonna hit that. Stud if you remember our measurement that we found earlier from the bottom of the TV to the bottom part of the bracket where I’m gonna put a bolt, it’s 11 inches. I off-camera found out that I wanted my TV to be 52 inches to the bottom of the TV. So 52 plus 11 is where my first bolt hole is gonna be. So that’s

63, 63

Inches is right there.

Bam center, the stud bottom bowl hole right there. This is gonna be the bottom left corner of my wall. Rack time to get my tools ready to go to Mount the sucker to the wall. Now that we know where our bottom left, hole’s gonna be a lot of you guys gonna be so excited calling your friends going, oh my gosh, I’m ready to attach my bracket to the wall. This is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me. Stop, stop, stop. That. Don’t do that. All right. The first thing we want to do is we’re gonna pick up our lag bolt. This is called a lag bolt right here, and we have to pilot drill this lag bolt. I’m not just gonna go ahead and, and throw this in the wall. I’m gonna split the stud. I’m gonna burn up a drill. It, it doesn’t work like that. Right? So what you do, you have to pilot the lag before you do it. Now I’m sure that online, you could probably find some kind of pilot chart or some kind, but I’m gonna teach you a trick. You learn this trick. You don’t need to worry about that chart. Okay. All right, let’s go ahead and zoom in right here.

As you can see this drill bit right here is the right size for this log bolt. And how you know is that once I hold the, the drill bit to the lag bolt, I should be able to see about an eighth inch of thread on either side of the drill bit. So in other words, this drill bit is covering up the whole lag bolt, except for about an eighth of an inch of the threads that I can see on either side. And that’s how you know, oh, so now we know how to pilot drill our, our lags into the wall. And we’re not gonna go ahead and start putting all four at one time, we’re gonna do one hole and I’m gonna show you guys why that’s like, that’s like the number one, rookie mistake. I hate it. When people go ahead and start drilling all their stuff, nonsense, go do that. Okay. I’ve already got it. Marked where I need to drill. I like to vacuum as I drill. So I don’t make a big mess everywhere. That’s just me. Guess I should turn it on. <laugh>

It’s amazing. How much better these things work when you actually turn ’em on, it’s like 10 times better. Okay. I just have a socket on the end of my drill. I have a little attachment that you can put on there. And from here, I’m going to grab my TV Mount. Okay. I’ve got my TV Mount your TV should have something on it. That indicates center. If not put something on here, put a Sharpie, mark, put a piece of tape. Whatever my TV Mount has this little level in the middle. That’s gonna tell me where center is. So I’m gonna lie at this center with that center. And that tells me where to Mount it. Okay, here we go. Looks like it’s gonna be right there. Okay. Uh, oh look, our wires are in the way these wires were installed before these wires were installed before we did the installation today. So there wasn’t really much I could do about where that box is gonna be, but don’t worry. All this is gonna be covered up once the TV goes on the wall. So I’m not even stressing about that part. Once I have one bolt in the wall, now I can level my TV. That’s why we don’t go ahead and just start throwing bolts in the wall. Because if I put a bolt here and then I put a bolt here and it’s off just like a tiny bit, an eighth of an inch or quarter of an inch, dude, my TV’s gonna be all over the place. So it’s really important that we put in one bolt. Then I’m gonna level them out.

And I’m not using that janky little metal level that’s built in here, dude, that thing’s rubbish. Okay. So I’m gonna make this sucker perfectly level right there. And that’s telling me I’ve already drilled. The I’ve already marked the center of my stud. So now I’m gonna go in the center of this slot, right? Where that stud is. Bam. Swap out to my pilot bit. I learned my lesson this time I gonna turn my quickly, switch it out and put in my next lag bolt.

Okay? At this point it should be straight, but I need to double-check because when you put in these things, maybe you didn’t hit the exact perfect spot. You never know. It’s not gonna double check. Put my level on there, dude. I should do this for living. It’s like dead on. Perfect. Now I have to do is put in the last couple bolts and this part of the project is done. I’m gonna go ahead and do that. Now I’ve got all four holes drilled and I didn’t want you guys to think I was cheating. I loose in the bolts up a little bit so I can pull off the tape. Boom wall bracket is on the wall. Well, let me tighten it up real quick. Notice I put my level back on there. It shouldn’t have any ability to move, but I’m a perfectionist. I want this to be rad when I’m done. If the TV is crooked, I don’t want it to be my fault. I want it to be because Samsung can’t make a straight TV,

Which is not the case. So everything here looks great. Don’t worry that your wall bracket is not perfectly like the bolt holes aren’t centered on the wall bracket. It’s not designed for that four bolts on the sucker will hold up a lot of weight. So that doesn’t bother me whatsoever. Kind of a bummer that this hole didn’t line up. I, I could have shifted this wall bracket up, but I would’ve had to shift it up about two inches. And I don’t like the idea of shifting it up two inches, cuz I really want the TV to be at the height that we had talked about with a homeowner previously. So I’m just gonna tuck these wires in. They’re not gonna be seen, TV’s gonna block all that. And when we come back at a later date to come put in his, his audio video system, we’ll maybe try to cover it up, uh, at that time. But most likely we won’t cuz this is all gonna be hidden. So now it’s time. Now that we have the wall bracket up, now we’re gonna move the electrical outlet. Cuz if I would’ve moved the electrical outlet before, maybe I would’ve done something like this and put the electrical outlet somewhere behind this bracket, then we have a new problem altogether. So now I know where the bracket goes. Now it’s time to start moving that electrical outlet and we’ll get started on that project right now.