Running Wires From Basement Question (1 Viewer)

I've got experience running cables from basement to the first and second floors from my last house, but my new home has me stuck. My last home, I had engineered rim joists which means that to get a cable into the wall above, all I had to do was drill down into the sill plate on the first floor and down through the top of the 2x4 that formed the top of the engineered rim joist...pretty simple. my new house has a different construction that makes this more difficult. The picture below shows the general cross section of what I am dealing with. Basically, there is a sill plate on top of the concrete basement wall followed by 2 doubled up 2x10 rim joists followed by another sill plate. The first level sub floor then sites on top of that and the framed first level wall on top of that. The basement joists are joined to the rim joists with joist hangers. Drilling straight down from the top in the framed wall cavity will not work since I will drill through the sill plate and into the doubled 2x10s...the hole will not exit into the basement which would happen if that was an engineered beam. How do I drill? Is it OK to drill on an angle from the top such that I pop the hole out on the side of the rim joists? Thanks for the help.

What type and how many wires are you wanting to run?

Running wires for wall mounted LCD with sourcees in basement. So will be running electric, hdmi, 2 Cat 5E (one for internet, one for IR repeater) and 7.1 surround speaker wire.

Electric should be run separate from the signal wires.


I say that angle drilling is your only option. Sites like smarthome.com have installer equipment like bendable drill bits that should make the job a little easier.

Angle drilling would certainly work (that's what I've mostly used in the past) but if you have a large circular bit for the drill (2 inches in diameter or more) and a chisel, you could use that to create a recessed cavity in the side of the 2x10's so that you could use a vertical drill from the top down.


In the end, it would probably be more work to do it this way, but figured I'd throw the option out there.


Good luck.