Wire day (Data Cable-2 Feb 02)

The big day was Saturday. The day before the Superbowl. I had one day, maybe a day and a half to get the cable installed.









There were three main runs, one bundle ended near the master bedroom, one on the west side of the house, and one in the basement. I only had time to pull the upstairs cable, the basement run would have to be pulled on site.

Once again I acquired cheap labor from my friend Mark and my loving, patient wife. The logistics of this work required many people doing light work instead of few working hard. I hinted around at work.

“Hey, Network guys!! Remember that time we wired up that closet for that new hospital tower? Man that was fun. Boy I wish we had something else to wire! Say, you know what would be fun…?”
“Hey there, Project Managers, I know you guys like projects ha ha…”


















I suppose it wasn’t surprising that nobody jumped at the chance to drive an hour on their day off to work for free. Not all was lost, however. A coworker’s son, Alex was looking for work and was willing to strap a ladder to the top of his car, drive an hour and a half to help for about 20 bucks.

So we started pulling cable. Things were going well. Some interesting notes for the day:

• Mark’s not a fan of heights.
• Alex, a hard worker, likes to pass the time talking.
• Make sure you haven’t threaded your cable through some impossible path accidentally.
• Toward the end of a 10 hour day, chocolate covered hostess donuts are good, but the donettes are outstanding. One bite = much chocolaty goodness.
  

Hiding the cables was tricky, we pulled the cables beyond the needed length and then loosely staple, them up inside the wall where they are out of view but within reach when we tried to grab them later. This actually was easier than it sounded and after some testing we were able to determine right length and tension for maximum stealth.












The main floor took most of the day and as the sun was starting to go down we moved down to the basement to run the cable down there. This wasn’t a complicated run but we did have to pull all of the lines individually, add 40 feet, then pull them up to the cabinets upstairs. Time consuming but not complicated.



We also drilled holes for the shades for all of the window shade cables. Originally we had tucked these cables behind the wall studs, but the more I thought about it, I thought it would be a huge pain to recover these unless I had drilled holes for them.








For the most part things were running smoothly. We had a couple of instances where we had to back a run out and run it over or under some obstacle. There was one instance where we had pulled 30 or 40 feet, tied it up, and started neatening it when we realized we had run it under an electrical cable. Untieing it was really a depressing thought, it would be faster but a lot harder to do. We chose to completely dissasemble the electrical outlet and move it around the cable.


A minor setback and we moved on.