GearBits

Painting Over A Masterpiece

My long journey is nearly at an end. For the past four years my wife and I have been looking for a new home. This started off as a list generated on my old HP 200LX capturing all the things we wanted our new place to have. Keeping that list always at hand, we concentrated mostly on pre-owned homes since I think it's silly for developers to continue swallowing up the beautiful farmland to build subdivisions when the MLS sites are full of great places that are already built. We went through lots of realtors, spent our Sundays going to open houses and did plenty of driving around checking out neighborhoods.

Oddly enough our searches kept leading us back to a very private street only a mile or so from our current abode. We looked at every house that became available there, but there was one house we loved that never went for sale. One fateful day last January our realtor marched up and knocked on the door of that house and got an impromptu tour of the place. She was giddy on her return and said "YOU JUST HAVE TO SEE THIS PLACE!!!" Since the owner (a home builder) was planning to move in the coming months, we did just that a few weeks later. We were smitten. But the house never went for sale due to delays in the construction of his new place.

Finally on October 15th, the house was listed. We went through it again the next day, made our offer and in just a few days we had a signed contract. A whirlwind of activity ensued which is why you have not heard much from me. I've done more painting, plumbing, and repairing in the last month than I want to do in the rest of my lifetime. Our current house is on the market and is in nice shape for a hopefully quick sale. And this leads me to the title of this little treatise...

The new house is perfect in every way except for one. It was built in 1995 when running lots of RG-59 and POTS cable was the norm. There isn't a Cat 5 or RG-6U drop in the whole place and to make matters worse, almost every space is finished with drywall. There is not much access for snaking wires though I do have a plan after studying blueprints until my eyes are sore.

I am going to attack this with the future in mind. I know that gigabit ethernet will be the norm rather than the exception in a year so my Cat 5e runs will have all four pairs pushed down. I cannot imagine life without my DirecTiVo so most of my cable runs will be pairs of RG-6U quad shield. I will probably upgrade my wireless access point from 802.11b to g. I have my eyes on a shiny new Apple Powerbook. I'm sizing up the built-in TV cabinets for DLP rear projectors. This place will be high and tight when I'm done with it.

My one grey area right now is with wiring architecture. I think the overly finished aspect of this place will preclude the use of the massive wire bundles that make up most structured wiring systems. I do want to have a central "wiring closet" where I can house my router, switches, amplifiers, wire terminations, video and audio distribution, etc, etc. If you have any experience in "old work" retrofit using the lastest wiring technologies, I would love to hear about it.

I'll try to keep this blog informed of my progress in what will be a labor of love. And please help Craig out with his HTPC as I will be doing another one of those pretty soon.