It sounds like you just have different priorities or a different aesthetic sense than folks like me who go to great lengths to hide cables.

To me it just feels good to wake up in a visually simple environment with things out of sight. It feels like magic, in a good way, to be surrounded by performant, reliable and useful technology but to be able to see almost none of it. And I have an automatic negative reaction to visual clutter or conspicuous machinery in my house.

I don't see anything wrong with your way of thinking. I can't easily change how I feel about it and I see no reason why either of us should have to.

Edit: this makes me think about sci-fi spaceships. Battlestar Galactica vs. the Heart of Gold from Hitchhiker's Guide. One has its conduits and controls run every which way and the other is minimalist to a fault. I like them both but would definitely prefer to wake up every morning in the latter!

That conduit would look terrible. Most people care about how their houses look. Decorative trunking exists: https://www.d-line-it.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/1240-x-... , I've used it, and it blends in well enough.

To be fair, it looks terrible to you (and to me), but there are plenty of people who have no issue with it. Just like there's people who get agida when there's things like toasters that sit out on the kitchen counter, but a lot of people think it's fine.

Just like there are people who don't care about how good or bad code they write as long as it works. Doesn't mean we should accept or promote this as 'good'.

Aesthetics aren't the same as quality, right?

Also, I would say writing bad code makes the code very inaccessible...just like burying important infrastructure in a wall.

Did that water leak last year cause mild growth in the wall? Don't know without some demolition! Want to upgrade your piping or electrical? Gotta destroy some wall, hooray, and then do more work to hide it again. Lunacy.

They aren’t the same but are highly correlated. You can have wrong opinions or poor taste.

I disagree, it's much easier to inspect cables or machinery when they're not hidden.

One of the apartments I looked at recently had this really annoying buzz in the kitchen, turned out it was a transformer that the previous owner plastered in. Definitely a big minus for me.

In my current apartment all cabling and piping is outside the walls because it was built before electricity was everywhere and I find it really handy <3. If the look bothers you it's not for you obviously but I don't think it's inherently worse.

I think you may have replied to the wrong person.

I've seen many places that were designed "industrial" with various metal parts (conduit, vents, etc) showing; and the people that owned them were very happy with the look.

Good code also doesn't need to "look pretty", it needs to be correct, and maintainable. Preferably maintainable by a less skilled developer with less domain knowledge. Following that logic, the code that follows the pattern of "highly visible and obvious", like the conduit, is probably the better code.

All that being said, I prefer simple walls, with conduit hidden inside it. I'm just happy to admit that what I like it not universal, and that other have their own styles.

It looks terrible to the vast majority of the population in most developed countries and it will severely impact your home's resale price if you have spiral conduit all over the walls. I can't remember the last time I saw spiral conduit in a home anywhere outside of the garage or basement...maybe a utility closet.

That's a pretty good idea. I'd consider this more if I wasn't just putting some keystone wall plates through the floor into my basement. I'd also have to put trim around a door frame.

3/8” flex isn’t surface raceway, it’s used for connecting a rigid (EMT/IMC/RMC) conduit system to a vibrating piece of equipment like a motor or transformer, among other things.

Wiremold 500 surface raceway is what I would recommend, it’s a basic surface raceway for electrical conductors or cables: https://www.legrand.us/wire-and-cable-management/raceway-and...

There are probably residential raceways that blend in better, but I’m not familiar with residential construction.

There are plenty of ways to get a cable from point A to point B inside of a wall, particularly if you have a single story home with an unfinished attic and basement. A spade drill bit, a fish tape, and a multitool/rotozip can get a cable pretty much anywhere if you can drill a hole into the wall cavity from above or below.

A friend of mine lives in a building with concrete floors above and below, all his wiring runs through plastic, surface-mounted, trunking and it is aesthetically disgusting.

I’m an avid DIYer and have no problem buying others’ high-standards DIY work, inspection/permits or no.

If I walked into a listing and saw surface raceway everywhere, I’d only bid what I was comfortable paying leaving room for a gut rehab. It’s evidence of a high level of DGAF at a minimum and likely isn’t the only place that corners were cut.

Do I understand correctly you're proposing to just run it on the outside of walls/ceilings? How would you ever again close doors that it needs to go through?

My aesthetic requirements are basically zero (to the dismay of my partner indeed; we meet in the middle) but I do want to be able to practically use the apartment still.

The interior doors in most houses that I have seen have wooden frames in which it is very easy to make holes for passing cables. Some newer houses might have door frames made of plastic or metal, instead of wood, but even in such cases it is much easier to make a clean hole through the door frame, instead of through a wall.

I have made many such holes in door frames for passing Ethernet cables or TV coaxial cables.

When you do not want to touch the walls, such cables can be routed on the edges between walls and floor and they can be masked by a cover having the wall color, to be invisible, except where passing through a door frame.

Why would you prefer to make a hole in your doorframe rather than the wall? Sheetrock is so much easier to deal with. But perhaps you are referring to a concrete construction, which is uncommon in the US.

Making a clean hole through a door frame takes a few minutes at most, with an electric drill machine, after which you pass the cable through the hole, you crimp the connector on the end of the cable and you are done.

At least in Europe where I live, I have not seen any walls through which you can make clean holes with high probability. Almost always there is some small damage, which must be repaired, e.g. by filling with plaster and/or repainting. In most cases you also need a percussion drill machine, not just a simple drill machine. Here most walls are made either of concrete or of bricks.

So at least in the kinds of walls that I have seen, passing a cable through a wall requires more time, more diverse skills and a larger set of tools and materials than passing a cable through a door frame, which requires only that you have and know how to handle a drill machine and a cable crimping tool.

>referring to a concrete construction

While common outside the US, most of it in newer constructions tends to be light concrete which is trivial to drill. But even 40MPa concrete is fine with an SDS, rent one if you don't wish to spend money on. In short drilling through outer walls is not difficult either.

> How would you ever again close doors that it needs to go through?

Most interior doors have a gap between the bottom of the door and the top of the floor, and you can cable in the gap if you don't mind the look. If the threshold is carpetted, you can often squish the wire into the seam where the carpet meets the door frame.

You can get one, maybe two, runs into a room that way, so don't put your central switch in a room like that, and if you need more than one drop in a room, put a switch in the room.

I’m picturing this as a tripping hazard, unless there’s some kind of well to shove the cable into (like your carpet example).

Even without carpet, you'd tack it so it stays pretty close to the side of the threshold. 'Nobody' uses the outside inch or so of the threshold, so it's not going to be a tripping hazard. If you are going across the threshold that's different, but in that case, it's better to go over the top of the door frame.

Do it like the real high class cable installers do: run the wires on the outside of the house and just drill through the walls where you want the drops. Looks fine from the inside!

> I feel like all of this comes from treating our homes as some kind of liquid asset that we must keep in pristine condition at all times so we can stage it and sell it at a moment's notice.

This seems like you are missing the point. The REASON that having a conduit hanging on the wall lowers the home value is because it looks bad and ruins the aesthetics… for both the current home owner and a future home owner. The reason the person buying the house would pay less is the same reason me, the current home owner, doesn’t want it… it looks bad.

I understand that some people don’t care about aesthetics at all (I am probably closer to that end of the spectrum than most), but you also have to realize that people care about how their home looks for more reasons than just resale value. Do you think the whole world only makes their houses look nice in case they want to sell?

Because what you propose is fugly and you don't want to live in a mess.

I wouldn't run conduit on my walls and around doors because I would think it looks awful. People's aesthetics are different. If yours (and those of anyone else who might live with you) allow for such a thing, then sure, go for it.

> I feel like all of this comes from treating our homes as some kind of liquid asset that we must keep in pristine condition at all times so we can stage it and sell it at a moment's notice.

Well, you aren’t wrong. This is exactly the thinking behind that.

The other response is correct that it’s nicer to have it all covered up though. I guess it comes down to a bit of perfectionism. If I stick everything on the walls I will always feel like there is work left to do.

That said, our living room is still (3 years in) a mess of (nice, not industrial) on-wall conduits.

I think it is wrong. Most people want to keep their house looking nice because they enjoy living in a nice looking house… this is the same reason why having a nice looking house sells for more. It isn’t like the whole world somehow decided to value nice looking houses for no reason and so everyone started keeping their houses nice even though no one actually cares.

Many people who own homes use them with an eye to selling and so they don’t bother with things that they’re afraid would reduce resale value.

Or they just run cable along the walls.

Many garages will be as you describe.

Imagine going up or down a floor. Really hard to do on top of existing walls, pretty easy with conduits in walls.

For this house, the easiest way to pull wires from one end of the house to another (after the original construction) is to first go down into the crawl space, cross horizontally there, then go up again.

We do have some conduit in place to run cables. One running up to a wall-mounted TV, and another running Ethernet up in to the loft. I don't mind the one under the TV, but I wouldn't like to use it for everything.

Don’t mean to be sexist but in my personal experience wives would consider cable conduit across a nicely painted wall in a nicely decorated room a hard no.

>a nicely decorated room a hard no

easy, skip the decoration

Having fiber cables hanging around is a sure sign you're a hacker.