We don’t have any sort of cable or satellite TV subscription, as we’ve decided we much prefer streaming stuff on Hulu (or marathoning an entire season on Netflix) rather than trying to watch our favorite shows during their actual air time. Every once in a while though, we find we want to watch something that isn’t available live online in good enough quality, like the World Series or Sunday Night Football. So we bought an ugly little antenna that sits on our TV console and mostly works:

What, you can’t see past the cute baby? 🙂 It’s the silver thing sitting up on the top left-hand side of the console table in the background.

Unfortunately, for some stations if you walk too close to the antenna the picture gets messed up for a few seconds. And for NBC, we only get signal if we stack a bunch of books (or board games, in this case) underneath the antenna:

So we bought an outdoor antenna, which requires a coaxial cable to run from the roof to the TV. When we first moved in, there were already two coaxial cables running through the wall from the outside. One at least has an attempt at an actual outlet box, though it wasn’t very nice looking. The other was (not) charmingly shoved through a hole in the floor trim:

Easy, long-overdue cleanup… Add a real outlet box and a cover:

All better! Well except for the drywall dust to clean up. And we don’t actually need the cable coming through the floor trim, so I’m going to just cut the connector off and shove it back down.

The other side of the wall  (on the outside of the house) looked like this:

The cable that comes up through the floor trim on the inside runs up the outside of the house and straight over the yard to the nearest telephone pole, so presumably that’s the cable TV line from back when a previous owner actually paid for that stuff. The other cable came out of the side of the house and just sat on the ground. Though it looked like it had also gone up the wall at some point, based on the house-colored paint on it.

To install the antenna, Dave cut a piece of plywood the exact size of the antenna base, attached that to the bargeboard, and then screwed the antenna base onto the plywood.

Don’t worry, he was lying on a towel, so no manly chests were burned or scraped during this installation. 😀

Then he hooked the cable up, (actually, I believe he had to attach a new connector onto the end of the cable, but since I didn’t get a picture I have no proof that this occurred) and amazingly enough, everything worked! I was so sure that the cable would be shot or something, but we were immediately able to watch NBC without a pile of board games and accompanying indoor antenna sitting on the TV console.

With proof that it was working, Dave attached the cable to the outdoor wall, next to the already attached other cable thing:

And this project is done!