Second day

Ok, so yesterday I was able to finish pulling wire into the master bedroom and into my office. See below for a picture of one of the awesome holes I put in the wall:



That hole is in my office under my desk. I also took a picture of what it looks like when I'm punching down the cable into the keystone jacks that pop into the face plate that covers that hole:

 

Ok, after I finished punching down the wires in each room it was time to tackle the other end of the wires, which were all sticking through a hole in the ceiling of my office closet:

 

Yes, that is a rag that I stuffed into the hole to stop the insulation from falling down from the attic. In hindsight, it may have been better to run the cables through a hole in the wall rather than the ceiling, but hey -- what's done is done and the rag is stopping the continual flow of insulation pretty well. I had to trim the wires a lot (we ran several feet extra on each run just in case) and then I started punching each one into the patch panel. Don't ask me exactly what the advantage of the patch panel is, other than it is a nice tidy place to end all of these long wires. That's really all it does as far as I can tell. Here is a picture of the back of the patch panel after I punched down all of the wires:

 

You might notice that there is a gap in the middle of the wires. I had allocated space to drop four (4) wires into the guest bedroom (aka Lilly's new library) but she covered all of the walls with bookcases and we didn't want to move them to drop wires. We still might add them in the future though, so I left the space in my panel. Next, I mounted the patch panel and the switch into a rack (this is a musician's rack, not a server rack that you would normally use, but it was WAY cheaper and works the same). I used short one (1) foot patch cables to patch each port from the patch panel to the switch. The switch is where the real magic happens. This is a picture of the switch and the patch panel mounted:

 

So, to summarize, the "internet" comes from Comcast and comes in through the wall and runs via coaxial cable into the closet:



You can see that I ran that cable along the ceiling and I intend to paint it to match the wall. Once the coaxial reaches the closet, it attaches to the modem that converts the cable signal to a signal that travels on ethernet cable. In the next picture the modem is on the bottom right. Then the modem attaches to a router (bottom left) which then attaches to the switch. The switch attaches to each cable that is running through the wall (via the patch panel) and distributes internet signal equally throughout the house.



Whew. I finished all of that around 10pm last night. I still need to get the three wireless routers up and running -- that's coming next!

First day of work

Ok, yesterday we were able to get ten (10) wires dropped into the shared wall between the living room and the new den/bedroom. We used an electrical box that was existing in the wall on both sides. Below you can see the wires on the attic side and on the bedroom side. The other end of the wire is fed through a hole in the office... we'll get to the office end of the wires later -- I haven't touched them yet.

In the next pictures you can see the wires are punched into the RJ-45 jacks and snapped into face plate and secured to the wall.

The one with four (4) is on the bedroom side and the one with six (6) is on the living room side. I also had to move the place where the cable entered the house. It used to be in the farthest guest bedroom near where the red dot is on the floor plan that I posted yesterday. Now it enters the house in the office, high up on the wall so I can run the cable along the top of the wall into the closet. Here are a couple of pictures of that:

So that's all I was able to accomplish yesterday. We'll see how it goes today!

Getting started

I've always wanted to have a completely wired home network. My wife and I both expect instantaneous response speed when using any device. We've been having trouble with that lately because we have only one wireless router that is on one side of a very long and narrow house. This poor little wireless router is supporting my main computer via a wired connection (which also serves as a media server) and several wireless devices: two cell phones, two iPads, two laptops, a Roku 3, sometimes a Chromecast, the Dish Hopper, the TV, the blu-ray player, the wireless printer and sometimes a Wii. Everything is connected to wi-fi these days. We found that when all of those devices were running, we couldn't even browse facebook while sitting on the couch. Sad. Unplugging the Roku helped a lot, but what if we wanted to browse facebook and watch the Roku at the same time? My wife never does just one thing at a time (always multi-tasking). Here's the floor plan of our house:

The red dot is where the lone wireless router is located right now, and the two green dots are where the old router and new router will be placed. The two new places may not be exactly the best and most center, but they will cover the whole house much better than what we have now. We are also going to place a router outside the house on the deck, to extend the wireless outside on the deck where we like to hang out when the weather is nice. My original plan was for the switch and other equipment for the wired network to go in the laundry room in one of these cabinets:

After exploring the attic a little bit, I realized that it would be very difficult to run wires to that far back corner of house, so our new plan is for the switch to be in the closet of the office:

This closet is right next to the hall that runs down the center of the house to all of the original bedrooms. Since it is centered in the house, it will make running wires to it very easy. The plan is to have four (4) separate cat6 wires running to each bedroom and five (5) running to the living room entertainment center. While I'm at it, I'm going to run a coaxial cable from the office to the TV. We have Dish (satellite) right now, so we don't need the TV to be connected to cable right now, but our Dish contract is up in September and we will probably switch to Comcast cable TV at that point. Since we already have Comcast internet, it will be cheaper to bundle that for a few years. Now I need to start running the wires!

June 6-7: Finally done.

This weekend we finished all of the touch ups on the baseboards and moved in the furniture! Over the last few days I had also been working on staining the door to match the other doors in our house. Here are the final pictures:

This is from outside the door looking in.

This is from just inside the door!

We have this old furniture that was rather cheap. Maybe at some point we will upgrade to better furniture.

I literally took a picture from every corner of the room.

Another.

And this is the only picture of my beautiful door that I have.

YAY! Done. Mostly. I still have some touch ups to do in the hallway. Still, we were very happy with how everything turned out!