As you can see from the diagram, I basically created “extension cords” of Ethernet wiring within the walls. Previously, the other computers in the room were connected by wires that I had to string on the floor, across doorways and through the living room. It was terribly messy, and dangerous.

This is the face plate after I had wired the Ethernet. The top two ports are telephone (RJ11) jacks. The others are Ethernet (RJ45) jacks. I left one blank because I didn’t need it filled at the time.

Ah, but now I have cable Internet, with coaxial wiring. I had fun yesterday, and learned how to wire a coaxial cable jack to my master face plate.

You’ll notice that the other two ports have Ethernet cables. These cables go to the router and to the switch, which is a device that acts like an extension cord for the router. Most routers have only 4 ports in the back, but I need many more connections. The switch is a big box that can hold more connections. The one I have holds 16 more Ethernet connections!

Eventually, I want to make the entire house wired. Currently, the computers in the upstairs rooms use wireless. While wireless is pretty handy, I don’t like using it for main computers. It takes up a lot of bandwidth when everyone is on together. Wireless is also a PAIN to configure and if there’s interference from airplanes, CB radios, microwaves, whatever, it can be frustrating when downloading stuff. Wireless is also less secure than wired connections.

The hardest part about home networking, in my opinion, is getting the wiring through the walls. Even when we gutted the walls, it was still hard to drill holes through such big, old lumber. Wiring the upstairs is easier because you can string the wires up into the attic and simply drop them down into the wall cavities without drilling horizontally through studs. When we renovate the upstairs, I will be adding a few Ethernet ports to each of the bedrooms.

We’ve had our home network system for a few years now, and I’ve never regretted it. The only thing I regret is not adding more ports!

The other kind of patching I’ll be doing is with a patch panel, Ethernet switch, and router. I am transitioning the computer Internet away from wireless, and working toward an all-wire, built-in system. I have the router and the switch (I got a good deal on a Netgear 16-port at Buy.com last month). All I need is a patch panel. Found a phenomenal deal (once again) at Buy.com. It’s the Tripp Lite 12-port shielded patch panel (shielded cables and panels help eliminate electrical interference). Looks sweet.

Basically, to install an Ethernet control station, you wire Ethernet cabling from the control station to all the various branches throughout the house. The wires in the control station connect to the patch panel. The patch panel has Ethernet RJ-45 jacks, as you can see in the picture. Those jacks receive Ethernet cables, and the other end of the Ethernet cables go to the switch. The switch is connected to the router, which is connected to the telephone system, which is coming from the telephone company. It’s similar to electrical wiring system, in that you have a “service entrance” that enters a service panel, and from there all the various connections branch out throughout the house. I think the most difficult part, next to wiring the cables through the studs and etc, is punching down all the little Cat5 wires into the slots. It’s rather laborious.

Anyway, Buy.com has made it pretty easy for me. They sell everything I need, from the equipment to the supplies like Cat5 cables, punch down tools, Ethernet cables, and more. All on sale or at good prices, and all delivered to my door! Nice!

And BOY am I ever glad I did! You see, I’ve been struggling with our wireless connection and security here are the homestead, and the constant hassles drive me NUTS. My kids have laptops upstairs, and of course there’s no ethernet cabling upstairs (heck, there’s hardly any electricity upstairs yet!). So we rely on wireless for their machines. Their laptops are old and new, with a mix of Windows XP, Vista, and Linux Xandros. I am the chief IT person for the family… and the CONSTANT hair-pulling problems with wireless have me screaming in frustration sometimes!

(If you need a well-written article on the properties and differences between ethernet and wireless, see this very good post here at BestBuy.com).

Of course, you don’t need to have ethernet cables inside the wall cavities to work. You can buy ethernet cables at any store, and plug them in to your router and string them across your room to the computers. But there are a few problems with that, obviously:

• You can only buy cables less than 100 feet long, or your connection quality diminishes.
• You have cables hanging all over the place.
• You can’t string the cables across windows and doorways.
• It all looks just darn ugly .

Well, I have decided that I am going to install ethernet cabling in EVERY room in this house, once we gut it. The problems with the wireless system is driving me crazy! Not to mention that having wireless can cause security problems within your network. EVERY network should be secure (see this post about securing your wireless network), but wireless security is an oxymoron. Hackers are figuring out how to get past the encryption codes to get onto your network, where they can make all sorts of trouble and even get you into trouble with the law. So, essentially, a completely wired system is best. And that’s what I’m doing when I can. Wired is better!

P.S. Remember, before you undertake any project with electricity, or go tearing out your home’s walls, check with a professional and be thoroughly read-up on the projects. Some older homes have toxins like asbestos, lead, etc– treatments for Mesothelioma are very unpleasant. Take extra precautions to know what you are doing, and to be safe in doing it!

I’m very keen for deals on supplies right now, and guess what?? I found some! Buy.com has Cat5 supplies– patch cabling, bulk wiring, RJ-45 modular plugs, couplers, and loads more. GREAT prices! Some of the stuff is free shipping. Buy.com is best know for their Weekly Sale deals on electronics but Buy.com has loads and loads of items, just about everything. Home and outdoor stuff, clothing, shoes, some books, housewares and supplies, DVDs, jewelry, cameras, vacuum cleaners- TONS of stuff. I love Buy.com and I think you should check the place out. I am absolutely sure you will find something you need at a good price. And they have terrific customer service, too. Check out Buy.com!

I’d always read in those home improvement articles to wire everything while the walls are open– even if you don’t have the fancy capacity for it yet. I used to scoff (the eternal penny pincher am I). But I have seen the light. I am doing this from now on. The Cat5 wiring has been such a great thing. It cost me a little extra at the time, and it was tough because my budget was pinched already, but I did it. Yippee! I love it when thngs work out like that.

I just HATE fishing wiring through interior walls of lathe and plaster. I won’t do it anymore. Actually, I still have half a house without electricity because I am waiting until I can gut and restore the walls. It is insane to fish the wiring. If I had the money to invest, maybe I’d just hire a guy to do it… but then again, I’d really rather do it myself, save the money, and gut the room and get new walls.

Of course, not everyone can install wiring and components for audio, video, and Internet. It’s rather complicated. It took me a lot of studying to figure out how to do it. So if you are in need of some nice wiring and just don’t want to do it yourself, hey check out Home Theater San Diego. They are consultants, design experts, and installation experts who can add everything from home audio wiring to home theatre wiring– whether your home is new or already built. Sometimes it’s so good to know someone will handle all the planning and installation, you know what I mean? And these guys can rig everything up with remotes (which is the latest luxury feature becoming more mainstream) to, for example, pipe music throughout the house, and more. Very nice. They work with very high-quality equipment, too. Check out their website or give them a call at 858-324-1704. And check out the FAQ page if you want to learn a thing or two about what’s new in technology and installation.

So… back to gutting the living room. OK. We pulled out the walls and some of the noggin (bricks between the studs, my post about it is here). I installed electrical wiring, telephone wiring, and ethernet Cat5 wiring (my posts where I blogged about it are here). Here are a few visual aids:

Learning HOW to install it was harder than the actual install. That took some time. When I felt confident enough, I made a total of four connections for the living room (we use four computers for our homeschool lessons)

This is the finished project for the connections at the work station. At each computer work station, there are more modems, ready for Cat5 ethernet cables to be plugged in.

Well, anyway, today the kids and I moved the furniture (well, they moved it) and we dusted and organized the room to prepare for school lessons. And we also shifted the computers around. I had to unplug all the cables and create new workstations. And BOY OH BOY am I thankful I didn’t have to lace ethernet cables all across the floors and walls this year!! I am slapping myself on the back for it. I am SO glad I paid that $70 for the wiring and installed it.

Moral of the story– it is true, it’s better to do everything you can while the walls are open rather than regret missing the opportunity later. I am so elated that I did something right this time, lol!

So I went to Home Depot to look for a new terminal and to get some POT. LOL, that sounds funny. Well, we searched high and low and could find no POT wiring. The guy there cut me some 18AWG speaker wire, thinking that would work. I got home and opened the wiring to discover that it is just too big and too cumbersome to try to run up through the openings.

Well, I did some heavy-duty research online and learned that the POT wiring is slowly being “sunsetted.” That is, it is not going to be on the store shelves very much anymore, because there is a new kid on the block: Category 3 wiring. Cat3, for short. I bought some and have found it to be a delight to work with. I did not find any phone terminal boxes, unfortunately. I actually can’t find them any anywhere. Weird. Do only phone companies provide them?

Well, since I already have my Living Room walls up, I had to fish this new telephone wiring through. It wasn’t too bad. I am used to fishing lines through walls around here. Let me say that it is sooooo much easier to fish wires through sheetrock walls!

I only had to fish one Cat3 wire through, even though I am going to have two telephone lines at this area. Cat3 has 6 wires in its sheath. You can see in the blurry photo below (sorry) that I wired two jacks with one cable. I am using orange and green for my POT “red”/”green” connection (with that old terminal) in the basement. (The terminal doesn’t care what color wire it gets, just as long as the wires makes a continous loop). For the other jack, I wired the Cat3 white/orange wire as my “red,” and the Cat3 blue as the “green.” The other two wires I tucked back. Maybe someday they will come in handy.

They say the quality is better using Cat3, too, since the wires are better insulated and twisted together to prevent interference on the phone line. Since I will be plugging my DSL modem into this telephone jack, I chose to make the line as good as possible to improve my DSL speed.

Category5 cables are used for ethernet lines. I wired an ethernet jack for all four walls in the Living Room, since this is where we homeschool and do office work. I have no fancy home network wiring panel… not yet anyway. I just rigged up the ethernet jacks to connect to the DSL modem that I will have at my “work station” (i.e., my desk). This is so that our computers can connect to the modem without having 100′ ethernet cables strung all over the floor and across walls.

Below are two shots of the ethernet wiring. You can see that the wires are color-coded. You just install the correct wires into the color-coded ethernet jacks (called RJ45). The jacks give you an option of using a wire pattern A or B. I chose A. The key is not which pattern is correct, but to pick a pattern and use it for everything. If you choose A for some and B for others, your network will not work.

After punching in those wires, I snipped the ends off and put on the little cover for the jack. It is amazingly easy. I hope it works! Since I have no modem in there yet, I can’t test the system. But it is an easy job, if a bit tedious. The colorful combinations keep it lively, however.

This is the finished project for the connections at the work station.

I left one blank for future use, if necessary. The top two jacks are RJ11– my two telephone lines. The remaining jacks are for ethernet. The DSL modem cables will plug into these. These jacks hold cables that run out under the room in a “star formation.” Our computers at the other ends of the room will plug into their corresponding jacks. They will be able to connect to our DSL modem through these wall jacks, rather than stringing cables all over the room. Eventually, it would be neat to build a whole home networking panel, but I am not interested in that right now. Gotta get the basics done around here, first!

P.S. If you are looking for a little help or just more info about telephone and data wiring, I found a few sites to be very helpful.

Expert Village How-To Video

Structured Wiring How-To

How To Wire Phone Jacks

I think the hardest part for me was understanding how the system works. This is not hard, I just didn’t know how the system works! Once I figured that out, installing everything was very easy.

Aw, poor me! LOL.

I take an ibuprofen and keep plugging along. I only have about four weeks until school starts, and we need this room to be done!

Today I bit the bullet and shelled out the cash for rigging up Cat5 internet wiring between the studs. I was really undecided about it for weeks. It just seemed more like a luxury, an added expense that would detract from the necessary needs of sheetrock and paint. But I decided to go for it because I know I will appreciate the effort in the future. I imagined what my room would look like with stringy yards of ethernet cable hung across the walls and over the doorways…I shuddered, and decided to install it. The installation went very easily. I haven’t actually installed the wires to the plugs yet– I only installed the boxes and strung the wiring through the walls and basement ceiling. Rigging up the wires to the jacks doesn’t look too hard.

I started spackling the ceiling sheetrock, just to get it done. We don’t have the walls up yet. My husband is going to do the walls, as that is truly too hefty for me. He works a full-time job, however, and therefore must squeeze in the drywall installation between dinnertime and bedtime. I must finish the ceiling as soon as possible, to get a light fixture hanging in there. Days are becoming shorter again, and the floor lamp we have been using isn’t sufficient.

I hate spackling, so I figure it will be less tedious if I do small jobs at a time. I have almost half the ceiling done (first coat). Tonight Hubby will install some walls, and I’ll spackle them tomorrow, as we go along.

No wiring projects for me yet, although I have a long list of them. The new washing machine circuit is working great– the house’s lighting voltage no longer drops when the washer kicks on! I have to wire a separate circuit for our sump pumps; that’s another small project to do. I’m saving the bigger projects (the lights for the stairwell, and wiring for the Kitchen, Bath, and Laundry Room) for when I finish the Living Room and we get moved back in there.

I am procrastinating! I have to swallow my cup of coffee and get back to the spackling.