Home Networking
Well, Day 1 of cable running didn’t go quite as well as I’d hoped. For one thing, I found out just how wimpy my cordless drills are. But, let me start from the begining….
Saturday, after going in for some tests and passing my kidney stone, I stopped at Lowe’s for some tools and supplies. Mainly, I got drill bits and wireties and that kind of junk. But, I also got a *good* stud finder and gloves and breathing masks. Very important as I was going to be crawling around in a very dusty attic. But, by the time we got through with the rest of our day, I wasn’t up for running cable. So, Sunday afternoon, I got set up.
First, I changed into the crappiest clothes I could find. Jeans and an old, long-sleeved t-shirt. Then I got my hat on, scrunched my mask down, and pulled my gloves on. Then, I crawled up into the attic with my fiberglass pull-rods and started fishing around for an opening. No luck. So, I crawled out of the attic behind the “server room” (ie. closet) and headed up to the main attic with the other half of my pullrod. I fished it down and when I got back into the attic behind the server room, I was in luck. I pulled the rod back up some and tied the nylon cord that I planned to pull cable with to the end. Then, after thinking about it for a minute, I tied a second line to that one to setup my second long cable run. After that it was back up into the main attic to fish the pullrod up and over. I managed that and, as I bellycrawled back out, I pulled the second line with me. That should, I hope, miminize the number of trips to the dusties part of the attic. That was the last easy thing that happend,though.
At that point, I got into the attic over where our office will be and tried to fish the pullrod down. After a little manuvering, it seemed to go just fine. However, when I got down stairs and cut my first hole for the wall plate, there was no pullrod. So, I went back up into the attic and tried again. Still no luck. Well, this time I decide to cut a hole for the second wall plate that I planned on putting in, but still no luck. So, it was back up into the attic to see what was what. It was then that I discovered that I had fished the pullrod down the *outside* wall behind the brick facade. Damn. At that point I figured out that I needed to drill through the top plate of the wall so I could fish my line. That’s when I discovered that my cordless drills were just way wimpy. *sigh* And, in fact, that’s where I finally gave up for the day. I’ll go back to it tonight and see if I can finish drilling that hole. If I can, then the rest should be downhill. And, I console myself with the thought that this is the hardes of the cable runs. The work of a network geek is never done!
