Last week we spent a good deal of time rearranging Justin's room so he'd be able to sit at, and do work at his desk. After moving his bed from in front of his computer, my two main issues were 1) his desk is only about 18" deep which hardly was enough room for his computer monitor, let alone a keyboard, and 2) How was I going to get Internet access in his room?
So Friday after work I stopped by Costco and picked up a new 24" Viewsonic monitor for me, which let Justin inherit my 20.1" Viewsonic perfectly giving enough room for his keyboard and trackball.
Now Internet... I decided I could move the modem and router into his room and give him a wired connection since he had a phone jack right next to his computer, and I was hoping that even though the distance was longer, having the router being higher off the ground, I'd get better WiFi access on my computer in the game room.
No such luck. I wired up his computer and the Internet was blazing fast, but mine, though it was reporting a 'good' WiFi connection could hardly load a page. I was jealous as hell :o) So out came my good old 100' CAT5 cable running across the house from his room to the game room. The wired connection was so much better than ANY WiFi I've used in the house I knew it would have to be permanent. Unfortunately the wife would never have a 100' CAT5 running through her living room and kitchen, even for fast Internet, so the time had come for another home improvement project.
So Sunday Lisa and I got some breakfast burritos from Sunny Rose, then hit the 9am service at church with Andrew. Afterwards I pulled out the drill and the boring bits. I drilled a 1/2" hole straight through the lower game room wall into the crawlspace the runs under the rest of the house, then fed all but 6' of the CAT5 into the hole. Then out came the 24" drill bit; I drilled a hole through Justin's wall, down through the floor.
Now came the dirty part. Crawling under the house and retrieving the cable, and pulling it over to Justin's room. Using the drill, I widened the hole in the floor and fed the CAT5 up to Lisa who was waiting to grab it. I used the opportunity to clean up the coax cable I'd recently installed in Justin's room before climbing out of the hole.
Then a quick trip to Lowes for a couple RJ45 wall plates. While I could have gotten a punch-down tool and one of those fancy mult-port plates, they wanted like $50+ for a punch-down tool. So I settled for a couple RCA screw-down plates. I got home and cut the slack on the CAT5. Pulled off the jacket about 3" back on each end of the cable, then had to carefully pull off the jacket of each of the 8 delicate wires within. Screw them down, then mount the wall plate after a quick test.
I vacuumed up all the wall debris, rearranged cables and viola: a perfectly clean room-to-room network connection. I spent an hour enjoying watching some Alice in Chains music vids on YouTube in HD on my new 24" monitor! Bliss. :o)
