I’ve finally started cabling my house (by alaric)
Now, actually putting sockets around the rooms can wait; we have wifi, so there isn't a great need for many sockets yet. The most important cable run by far is from my desk to the phone sockets, so that's what we did, running two cables to support phone and network.
We managed to find holes through the major beams that run crossways across the room and fed the cables through those.
We then used the holes through the minor beams the power cabling goes through to complete the run from the front of the room to the back of the room, as the phone sockets are on the front wall while the door to the office is against the rear wall of the house:
It's not good to run network cables alongside power cables, so we did that as little as we could, and if interference seems to be a problem in future, I'll try and surround the cables with screening (eg, aluminium foil) at the appropriate points.
We took the cables up through a hole that had once taken a power cable into the airing cupboard upstairs, now redundant since the house was rewired and the new cable taking a slightly different route:
Then up inside the airing cupboard and out through the wall above it, to then face the challenge of drilling through a foot or so of stone.
The drill went in easily enough at first, then stopped. We took a look in the hole, and saw that the grey of breeze block went in for a while, then there was a cavity of a centimetre or so - then rusty reddish brown. Uhoh - had we hit a metal joist?
A bit of poking with a probe revealed that the drill had indeed cut a depression into the red surface; it was just solid stone. So we switched to hammer mode and drilled and drilled and drilled, having to take breaks to let tired arms relax, and for the drill to cool down whenever it became worryingly hot.
If you click on this picture to zoom in, you can just see the cavity then the red surface inside the hole:
And, finally, we broke through!
Then it was just a matter of pulling the cables through the hole, fixing the final run along the beams in the office, and mounting a nice double 8P8C socket. Sadly I snapped the back box while making a hole for the cables to go in, but I still used it - as we speak the snapped off piece is held on by string while a generous helping of epoxy resin glue is drying inside.
At the other end, I want to have a patch panel one day, so just (for now) attached another double socket without a back box.
Building Maintenance, Sci/Tech | alaric | 
Sun 1st Jun 2008 11:55 pm
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By duncan, Mon 2nd Jun 2008 @ 8:56 am
good luck, i laid cat6 throughout my house when the central heating was upgraded - as the plumber had the floorboards up i thought it wise to lay cables. so i decided to put two cables into every room, from the "data cabinet" - where a hot water tank was in the annex. in the end needed rather a large hole to fit 10 cables through - but luckily my plumber had all the required drillbits to hand.
still almost a year on, and ive only wired up 2 of the cables - the patch panel is still in its box awaiting a rainy day when im motivated enough to do the trunking, fix the boxes and test everything.