My new favorite tool.

Flexible Drill Bits

Flexible drill bits are made for drilling in the wall cavity and are a real lifesaver for remoldelers, and with good reason. Apparently, they're very popular with alarm installers too. For about fifty dollars you can save yourself a whole lot of time and hastle, and after all...isn't that what its all about? Over the weekend I was under the house trying to drill a hole up through the bottom sill of an interior wall to run a phone wire. Sure, I could have tacked it along the base board, but that's just, well...tacky. I cut holes in the drywall for the receptacle boxes. I use the blue plastic "old-work" boxes. I like these since you don't have to hit a stud to install them securely. If I had a flexible bit, I could have then inserted it into the cavity and using the accompanying in the wall guide tool, drilled a hole through the sill and into the crawlspace. Once in the crawl space, I could have attached my phone wire to the fish eye and pulled it back up effortlessly. Instead, I was relegated to the "tapping" technique, where I would crawl under the house and "tap" the sill with a screw driver and holler up to my wife..."Is that close?" Then cross my fingers and drill away. Then, worse still, I had to thread six or eight feet of cable up through the hole, return inside and fish it out with a coat hanger. Easier said than done. What should have been a twenty minute phone relocation took about two hours. I ordered the fish-bit the next day. Fifty dollars well spent if you ask me, I'm going to use it and my new recessed light hole saw this weekend. I'll update you on the time savings delta. It should easily be enough to pay for the tools on just one project.