Last week we had our carpets professionally cleaned in our living room and we had all our furniture moved out of the area. It was the perfect time for me to get access to that wall, take the TV down (first time since it was mounted, a bit scary, not going to lie), and get the outlet installed. Thanks to my handy dandy Black & Decker’s Complete Guide to Home Wiring I was able to accomplish the task.

I’ve never done any electrical work by myself in the past. I was a little nervous, but everything went smoothly and both the original outlet that I branched off of and the new outlet behind the TV worked great afterwards. Here I am pig-tailing some wires together.

A little crooked, I know, but it just needs a small adjustment and it will be level and ready to go. The other hole in the wall is an access to conduit that runs down the wall and has a similar hole by the baseboard. The builder had put this in and it’s for running HDMI cable, CAT6 Ethernet, etc. I just don’t have the right face plate for it yet.

So, after going on under these conditions for about a week, I decided finally that I should just run some Ethernet cable from the basement internet connection, through the floor, and up to the entertainment center area of our living room. To set the stage a little bit here, I had been planning a project like this for over a year, but I’d just not ever gotten around to it. No more procrastination, it was time to do something!

I had the perfect opportunity on Saturday, when Kirsten and Abigail went to a shower for our wonderful friends and I was stuck home alone with Mattie:

I removed the baseboard from the wall behind our entertainment center using a putty knife, flathead screw driver, paint scraper, and a 12oz claw  hammer. Then I was able to drill through the floor underneath the drywall but behind the baseboard with a long wood boring bit. I would say those two steps were the “scary” part. Once they were done, the rest was slowing going, but not hard. Simply running four CAT6 Ethernet cables from my bulk supply down through the hole in the floor, into the basement, along the floor joists and into the soon-to-be-network closet. Here are some pictures:

Here you can see the hole I’ve drilled through the floor down into the basement, along with one CAT6 cable running down through the void.

Here are the four cables after I was done running them all through the floor. Notice the conspicuous absence of a baseboard.

This shot is from the basement and is of the four cables tacked to the wooden flooring for some semblance of organization.

Here are all four cables at the entertainment center end (notice the baseboard back in place). They are all terminated in CAT6 punch down jacks. The four jacks will pop into a “keystone” wall plate that I have on order, but isn’t quite here yet.

And here is the shot of the tools I used to get the job done. Drill, wood boring bit, fish tape, several sets of pliers of various types, screw drivers, hammer, putty knife, RJ-45 crimping tool, punch down tool, flash light, and utility knife, to name a few (and not in any order, sorry).

If you’d like to see more pictures of the project, you can find them in our Flickr account. More pictures coming soon too after the wall plate is in, the network patch panel for down stairs, etc.

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