A partial rewire runs new circuits through finished walls without opening the whole house.

Adding a circuit

Adding a circuit means a new run from the panel to a new location, on its own breaker, not shared with whatever else happens to be on that side of the house. The most common reason we hear: a window unit or a portable AC that keeps tripping a bedroom circuit shared with three other outlets. The fix isn't a bigger breaker on the existing circuit — that just moves the overload problem downstream into wire that wasn't sized for it. It's a dedicated 20-amp circuit run to that one location.

Whether that's a same-day add depends entirely on the path: if the panel has an open slot and the attic or crawlspace gives us a clean route, it's often one visit. If the route has to go through finished ceiling with no attic access above it, we say so in the walkthrough and price the drywall patch as its own line, not a surprise on the invoice.

What a partial rewire actually touches

A partial rewire replaces the wiring feeding a specific area — a kitchen, a run of bedrooms, everything downstream of one bad splice — without touching circuits that are working fine elsewhere in the house. It's the right call when cloth-insulated wiring, aluminum branch circuits, or knob-and-tube shows up behind one wall or in one section of attic, and wrong when someone's trying to avoid pricing a full rewire by doing it three rooms at a time over three years. We'll tell you which situation you're in during the walkthrough, including if the honest answer is that a partial won't actually solve what's failing.

No generator work, no service upgrades past 200 amp, no solar interconnects. We'll say who to call instead.

Romex through finished walls

Running nonmetallic sheathed cable, what everyone calls Romex, through a wall that's already closed up means one of two paths: fishing it through the existing cavity from an accessible point above or below, or cutting and patching. Fishing is cleaner and faster when the wall is a straight run with no fire blocking in the way; older Austin houses built before the 1970s often have horizontal blocking partway up the wall that stops a fish tape cold, and that's when a small access cut becomes the honest answer instead of forcing a wire through a hole that isn't there.

We cut old-work openings only where they're needed, patch drywall to a paintable finish, and never leave a wall open overnight in an occupied home. Drop cloths go down before the first cut, every time, not just on request.

Conduit for exposed runs

Garages, workshops, exterior walls and anywhere the cable can't be buried inside a finished surface get conduit instead of bare Romex — EMT for most interior exposed runs, PVC or rigid where it's outdoors or subject to physical damage. Conduit costs more in material and labor than fishing cable through a wall, and we won't skip it just to shave the estimate on a garage subpanel feed or an exterior fixture run, because exposed NM cable outdoors is both against code and genuinely more likely to fail from UV and weather within a few years.

Wire gauge and breaker matching

Twelve-gauge wire on a 15-amp breaker is legal; it's simply oversized and safe. Fourteen-gauge on a 20-amp breaker is not legal and it's the mismatch we find most, usually where someone extended a lighting circuit to feed a new outlet without checking what protected it. We correct the breaker or the wire, whichever actually matches the load, and note it in the written scope either way.

Wiring & Panel Work — pricing and scope

Request a wiring walkthrough

Tell us what the new circuit needs to power and roughly where it runs, and we'll book a walkthrough before quoting anything.