So I've been in this house for just over a year. It's a 60-ish year old house and of course is in of some upgrades, to include wiring and an update to the internet and wiring situation here. When I first moved in my first aim was just functionality, and as such, my wireless router is simply sitting on my desk, on the bottom floor, far away from the a central point in the house. Due to the location of power outlets, and lack of ethernet runs throughout the house, I settled for the existing non-optimal location for the router with the intention of eventually running lines to all points in the house. Today began that journey.
Since my partner also works from home, it's challenging to find a good time when they aren't working, and when the kids aren't needing constant attention. Luckily I had a day off today with no kids, however my partner was still working. "No worries, I'll just fiddle with the wires they're not using" I reckoned.
Relatedly, I recently hung our flat panel tv on our living room wall, and of course the wires look like absolute garbage. I resolved to run the wires through the wall, and took to Amazon to research the best option to do this and settled on these round 3-inch ports that come with their own hole saw. So I get all my gear out, and take my stud finder to make sure I'm between a couple studs. I do a few passes, and I mark a decent spot, pull out the drill, and start cutting the first hole behind the tv. There was a little resistance at the end that I didn't think much of until I pull the round piece of wallboard out - and there, directly in the middle of my hole is a stud that hasn't seen the light of day in 60+ years. Cursing under my breath, I take out my stud finder again and do a couple more passes. Nothing. God damn it.
So with my finger, I feel around the inside and find a spot a few inches over and drill another hole. I then get out the level, measure down the wall and drill out the other hole. "Success" I think, "this'll be over in no time". Nope. There's of course paper-backed insulation in the wall, and I don't have a fish tape, so I go and use some extra romex cable laying around, tape the end and try to fish it through. Nope. 4 more tries. Nope. So I resolve to go to the home improvement store but before I do, I measure out the power cable from the Television, and then it dawns on me - these grommets are only rated for low-power type cables...not power cables. A quick google search tells me that running tv cable behind a wall is against code. Dammit again. So I look up what to do - there's a special plug-in port that goes in the wall that code-approved - it's basically the same thing as before except there's romex that runs down between the two hole and plugs in so you can plug in your television to this port. I check Amazon... don't want to wait. Okay so I run to the home improvement store.
After grabbing what I need I finally find aisle with the power ports - one is cheap and just what I'm looking for, but it's a square receptable...then I spot a significantly more expensive one, but it looks like it is the same size as the holes I drilled. I grab those and feel the pain at the register. Head home.
I bought fish tape but the kit came with it's own, and this time I WAS successful in running the power cable through so then I look at the HDMI cables. shit. Are they going to reach? I test one. Nope. Dammit x3. So now I run out again to the local Audio/Video store that doesn't open until 11:00... and they of course only have the super expensive HDMI cables. I hold my breath and feel the pain at the register again, shoot home and fish the cables through. Friggin finally. I screw the grommets into place and hook everything up. It looks great, except for the fact I have 3 wires that I need to hide still that are going to the wall-mounted sound bar. Issue here is it also has a power cable so do I need a whole new kit? Probably not - I may have a work around for another day.
Moving onto the networking project. My office space shares a wall with my half-garage - in fact my office space is in the space that was half of the garage. I previously mounted a 16 port ethernet switch in a corner of my garage and I intended to run my whole house off of this thing, but first I need to route the rat nest of wires in my office through the wall... luckily I have some left over wall ports from my previous project. This foray proved to be quite a bit easier, however. I use the hole saw to drill a hole on one side of the wall, poke a center hole through to the other side, come around and drill out the other side. Then it was a simple matter of putting in the grommets and running the ethernet cable from the router to the switch and my devices into the switch. The catch is that some cables aren't long enough (of course), and my partner is using the internet for work so I can't move the modem or the router to the garage. Okay, I'll have to do that this weekend. No worries.
Next up - there's an ethernet wire that the previous owner ran from the office area through the lower level crawlspace, to the outside of the house, up the vinyl siding and into the top level bedroom wall. The cable was too long so I intended to re-tip the cable, and so I get out the fancy new crimp tool that I bought. I haven't crimped an ethernet cable in quite a long time so I check the instructions real quick, check the wire, and dammit... the wires are non-standard color scheme. I check the old jack and mirror the scheme and set about tipping the ethernet cable.
Well, let me tell you that: tipping ethernet cables is one of the most frustrating things in the world. Seriously. It took me so long to get all the wires to stay in the right order and at the right length before I could stuff them into the jack... no lie, probably 20 minutes. I get that done, and check the connection upstairs and only then realize that my gemini server is down. what the heck. I go about troubleshooting for the rest of the day before I had to leave to pick up my kids. Was it fail2ban? nope? ipchains? nope. Server is down? nope. Check the logs. Nothing obvious. Maybe it's the hardwire...go back to wifi. Nope. Static IP is off? Nope. Time runs out and so I resolve to check the port forwarding on my router after the kids go down. Get the kids, do the nightly routine, get on computer and poke around the router... can't find anything. Browse my site one last time on Lagrange... and like a miracle my site works again. I think maybe resetting a few things in my router fixed it.
In between all of this I found some time to put the first coat of polyurethane on the old pine kitchen table that I'm refinishing. I stripped it down and stained it a few weeks ago, but weather and work as prevented me from doing the poly. This is my first time using polyurethane so I look up a few youtube videos and set to it...and let me tell you it's harder than it looks. I got most of the table without bubbles and rough spots, but there are still some there. I'm hoping after the next sanding it'll smooth it out.
So, that was my fun-filled day off of house projects. I feel a bit accomplished and because of the kids and work I have to cram as much as I can into the days I have. Now I just have to fix that hole in the wall, move the router and modem, and start installing ethernet wallports through the house as soon as that 1000ft of Cat 6 comes in the mail.
I doubt anyone other than myself will make it this far into this post but if you did, thanks for reading, and hopefully I didn't waste too many minutes of your life with this rather boring recounting of my day's house projects.
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Gritty
2022-04-08
Tags: projects