Wire Your Home with Ethernet Cable - Step 2

  Step 2 - The Wiring Layout
Here in Step 2, we'll review the basic layout that we used in our example. Obviously, your layout will not be the same. However, you may learn some things from our layout that will help develop your own set up.

In our example, we'll be using a home office as the starting point for the installation. The home office contains the main computer that has a modem connected to the Internet, and we want to have shared Internet access with computers in a sun room and bedroom. Next to the main computer, we have a multi-port hub. We'll run a cable from the hub to a wall jack in the home office. Then we'll run cable through the walls between that jack and a jack in each other room (the sun room and bedroom). Then from the jack in each room, we'll run a cable to the network interface card on the other computers.

Luckily...and this is critical...the home office is above a garage and below an attic. This is important because of one absolute key to installing home wiring: namely, you want to take advantage of any "open" areas to help you gain access to the walls in your house. By open, we mean places in the house that are unfinished and don't have drywall or other coverings on the walls and/or ceilings. This includes garages, attics, basements, crawl spaces, unfinished 'bonus' rooms and similar spaces. The easiest situation, then, is to have such an unfinished space between the rooms that you'll be connecting.
  For example, back to our situation, the home office is above the garage and the sun room is beside the garage. Similarly, the home office is below the attic and the bedroom is below the same attic. Thus, we worked from the garage to run cables to both the home office and the sun room. And, we worked in the attic to run cables to both the home office and the bedroom.
 
In our setup, we also extensively used another key to fishing cables through your house: use existing holes created for phone and cable TV cables. Usually, the phone or cable wires will only take up part of the space created by the holes drilled in the wood beams. There should be room left to insert the UTP cable with ease. Do NOT, however, use holes created for AC wires since the AC power lines could add interference to the Ethernet UTP cable.

Now, with access to the walls from an open space AND hopefully a shared hole with phone and/or cable TV wires, you can begin to select the actual locations for the wall jacks. In our situation, we found a phone and cable TV line running up through a hole in the ceiling of the garage. By carefully measuring the distance of that hole from a reference point (in our case, an outside wall) and then measuring again from that same reference point in the home office, we were able to determine approximately where on the home office wall we could get the cable to. The key is to make sure that the original hole and the hole you are about to cut in the wall are within the same two studs (the wood running up behind the wall). The two studs form a channel behind the wallboard and once you have access into that channel, it's fairly easy to get a wire to anywhere on the wall between those studs.

One last tip for now. Whenever possible, try to use walls on the inside of your house versus the outside. The reason: most inside walls will not contain insulation and it will be easy to maneuver the fish wire to the location of the holes in the wall for the jacks. Outside walls, conversely, usually do have insulation and that will make it more difficult to maneuver the fish wire.
 
Many of these details should all become much clearer as we go through all of the details in Step 3.

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