Weekend Projects, Part II

Yesterday I indicated that there was more to Saturday’s saga than just yard work…

The sad reality is that I woke up 2 hours before my wife to start re-wiring our house.

You see, I like to add stuff to my computer network, and I’m starting to run out of plugs around the house, especially in the office.   I have been waiting to add more connections though, because I am at maximum capacity of cords I can shove down into the existing network box in the master closet (you have to run each cord directly back into a single location in the house).  So I’ve been putting off adding anything else until I could resolve how I was going to get more wires down the wall in the closet.

My solution?  Move all my network gear to the other side of the closet (which is easier to access from the attic), drill new holes into the attic for the wiring, and open up the wall and install a large low-voltage panel to handle about twice the network drops I have right now.

Sound simple, right?

I thought I had it all thought through, so I began by exploring the wall.  I started with my stud-finder, but quickly thought it was giving me false readings.  There was no way I had a 6″ stud in the wall with a stud only 6″ away from it.

So I started cutting into the wall.

Sadly, I found a water pipe in that wall, directly behind where I was going to install the new box.  And yes, 6 inches away from that was the world’s largest stud (besides myself, of course) – three 2×4’s nailed together.  All these things are completely blocking the area where I wanted to install the box.

No problem.  I worked through the issue, and mentally repositioned where the box should go.

Then I headed up into the attic.

(I would have a photo of the attic here… but I was not getting back up there just for a photo op… just picture me rolling around in 18″ of blown-in insulation.)

Now, if you’ve never done attic work, let me beg you to never start.  Being in the attic is bad enough, laying prostrate across beams and trying hard not to step on any drywall so as to come directly through the ceiling.  Add to that the difficulty of being a large man in a small attic, and it gets worse.

I get up in the attic and find (under the 2 feet of insulation) that because of stupid plant shelves, there is no direct route down into the wall where I want to reroute all the cords.

So after two and half hours of exploratory drilling, frustration, and making holes in the walls, ceilng, and attic, I had to just give up on that project until I can recieve some further inspiration as to how I’m supposed to proceed.

Then… I went out into the yard to help my wife…

Now, perhaps you can see why my Saturday felt so fruitless when I gazed at that single stick of a tree poking out of the ground.