Today’s project began in the basement of the house. This rather complicated picture shows the mess that has been waiting for me to get creative and clean it up. Last summer when we installed a wireless Internet service (antenna on the roof) the best place for the modem was in the basement. I have pointed to it with the red arrow since it is hard to see against the rough concrete wall and the mess of wires and cables. The system is relatively simple; a single coax cable comes down from the roof and is terminated on the modem, then a Cat5E cable runs upstairs to the router by the computer. The modem is plugged into power down here and I added an additional Cat5E cable down from the router for today’s project. This entire mess and project is all about connecting the shop to the Internet.
I built a shelf to replace the stepladder and then routed all the wire and cables so that they found there way to the router without the snarl I had before. I wired an additional outlet on the post where the shelf is attached, replacing the drop cord that fed power to it before. I also ran another phone wire from our phone center to the office upstairs so that we could have a telephone beside the computer. I also led the extra Cat5E from the router across the basement to the telephone center where I had two cables from the shop terminated.
With the basement work done I moved to the shop and opened the communication junction box and punched down some network connectors and used a short patch cord to connect the two. I will clean this up another day with mounting hardware. The final project was to install connectors behind the PC in the shop office and then install a network card in my shop PC. This turned into a long day’s project, but in the end I was able to connect to the Internet in the shop.