Work Continues on the Home Office

Our house has been an ongoing project for a decade now. No, my wife isn't really happy with that fact and, eventually, I'm sure that we will get it to a state where she might be satisfied ... at least for a little while. During that period, my home office has undergone several iterations with the wall color changing from white to gray/blue and now Behr's Butternut Wood. Sounds edible.

One word of advice! About five years ago, I watched a few of those home remodeling shows and got the bright idea to paint stripes on the wall. Never paint stripes on the wall unless you intend to keep them forever. Taped off stripes are about impossible to cover up. I tried sanding. Didn't work. I finally slapped sheetrock mud on the wall and sanded it down to do the trick. Of course, I'm sure you're familiar with the mess that ensued. A half dozen coats of paint were required to cover up the mud. Add in the complication of a gallon of paint from Home Depot that didn't quite match the other two and you'll understand my frustration. Of course deciding to change the trim color in the whole house was another complication!

Besides the painting, I'm also moving the main components of our home network upstairs since we want to use that downstairs room for a den. To accomplish that task, I needed to run our ISDN line from Bell's box to upstairs where I've set up a place in the closet for the router and, eventually, the server. Of course, there was no electrical outlet so I had to install a cut-in box and tap into an outlet on the other side of the wall. No problem there. Pull some Cat5 all over the place, buy some rather overpriced (but very easy to install and neat appearing) On-Q legrand keystone connectors, wall plates, etc. and have a good time climbing into the attic and under the house.

I completed the wiring this morning and moved the routers upstairs for testing. Besides one unexplainable burp, it seems to be working fine now. Moving the Linksys WRT54G wireless router upstairs didn't seem to effect the coverage at all. Photos and more on the wireless setup later.