Now that we have most of our boxes unpacked, one of the tasks that made it onto my to-do list yesterday was getting some of our in-house network cabling done. Our internet service comes into the basement, where I have a shelving unit full of computers and networking equipment; for the past week, we just threw a wireless router down there and used our laptops up on the first floor. The signal doesn't reliably get up to all of the second floor, though, meaning that our office up there was more or less a no-computer zone, not something that's optimal for long-term life. Thus, I really wanted to get some cabling in that would allow us to move the wireless router up higher in the house, and maybe even provide wired network service to the desktop computers.

I decided to start simple, and planned out the wiring between the basement and the first floor. I figured that the logical place for the cabling to terminate was the living room -- on the baseboard just behind our television stand -- and this turned out to be pretty easy to achieve thanks to the stack of stairways that runs behind the wall against which the TV sits. I ran two category 5e cables across the exposed basement ceiling joists, through the single sheet of drywall that forms the inner wall of our basement stairs, up the wall about six inches, and then straight into the area behind the baseboard. I was (needlessly, it turns out) hesitant to install keystone jacks and a flush faceplate into the baseboard without also putting in an outlet box, so I used a double surface-mount jack box at both ends instead, and then punched the cable down into the jacks. After testing everything out, I had two connections in place from my basement up to the living room, both capable of supporting up to gigabit ethernet speeds.

Moving the wireless router upstairs has been great, and the second connection meant I was also able to move the Vonage phone adapter out of the basement as well. (We have a wireless phone system hooked up to the Vonage line, and now we're able to have the phone base up in the living room where it provides a bit more reliable coverage throughout the house.) My problem, though, is that this has whet my appetite to also get wiring from the basement up to our study on the second floor, and I can't see an easy way to do that without either ripping into walls or running the cabling outside. We have a mixture of plaster-and-lathe and sheetrock walls (with the sheetrock ones mostly framed in front of the original plaster ones), and we don't have any obvious clever places (like stacks of closets, or perfectly vertical plumbing pipe columns) that connect the basement to the second floor. I'm going to have to think this one through a bit, and in the mean time, set up a wireless router as a repeater on the second floor so that I can put our printer onto the network. Here's hoping for a solution!

(Postscript: I had all intention of taking a few pictures to illustrate this post, but got buried in the paperwork I need to fill out to start my new job tomorrow. Sorry!)