Cable to the Kitchen

We want to move the WiFi router to be closer to the middle of the house,  It seems like the easiest thng to do would be to put it where the phone used to set (back when we had a landline) on the counter between the kitchen and the living room.  The WiFi router takes a (short) ethernet cable from the cable modem.  So we need to move the cable modem.

To move the cable modem, we need a cable drop in the new home for the cable modem.  We already have a telephone jack in the wall of the kitchen next to the counter, and without a telephone, we really don't need it, but that would show us where to drop the cable down into the kitchen.

 So our plan is to replace the telephone line with a cable drop.  First we need to find where the telephone line comes from the attic into the kitchen wall.  We remove the cover plate from the telephone outlet, and expose the electrical box behind it.

 We measure that this is about 20 to 24 inches from the peak of the ceiling in the living room, and roughly in the middle of the skylight.  Going into the attic, we remove the radiant barrier that covers the insulation for that wall and remove the insulation to find the phone line going down into a hole in the top plate of the wall.

 The hole for the phone line is really small -- too small for the cable -- so we drill another larger hole in the top plate next to it. 

We find a new wall plate that has a cable connection, and a cat5 and an empty square hole in it, and figure, as long as we have everything open, rather than replacing the phone line wiring, we'll just add the cable, and a cat5 connection.  

Which means we need a connection for a phone line to the wall plate.  So off to Home Depot to get a Voice Grade Jack from Commerial Electric (1000 023 234).  The instructions (online) show how to wire it for a normal phone line (cat3).

 While we are at Home Depot, we get a brand new 12-foot run of coaxial cable, since we only need to run from the kitchen straight up to the attic and over a bit to the cable connection board, which is all but right overhead.  

We already have some spare cat5 cable (the yellow cable in the picture above), so we run all those down into the kitchen wall, and out and into the electrical box.  The hard part is conneting all three to the back of the wall plate and putting it all back into the wall.

 

Painting above the windows

 Some of the windows are in the middle of solid stone block walls.  To do this, they put a metal plate from the stone wall on the right to the stone wall on the left, and then put the stone blocks that go above the window on top of that metal plate.  For example here is the exterior view of the small window in the master bathroom.

 Notice how this is not a problem when there is no stone above the window, then they just put a 1x4 piece of wood, as in this example of the small window in the central bathroom which opens out onto the deck.

 All the windows with the metal plates are on the West and Southwest sides of the house.

The plates were painted, at some point, to try to match the color of the stone -- an off-white.  But the paint is weathered and peeling.  For example, here the small double-hung window in the loft.

 

There are 3 colors that might be reasonable for these bars -- trying to match the stone, trying to match the trim around the window, or trying to match the wood trim of the house (which we just had re-stained and is Behr Chocolate SC-129).  We used a photo-editor to select and change the color of the metal plate in the above photo, and Linda selected the Chocolate color to match the house trim.  So off to Home Depot to get a quart of that.  $37.76, including masking tape and plastic film.

Each of the plates is at most 4 inches deep, and the window lengths are 24 inches for the small windows and 30 inches (times two) for the larger windows.  With 4 of the small windows and 4 of the larger double windows, we get a total of 36 lineal feet or 12 square feet that need to be painted.  A quart should cover about 88 square feet.

 The first task is to scrape and clean the metal plates.  Then we had to mask off the window and the surrounding stone.  That took 2 hours. 

 Then there was the actual painting, another hour.

There were a few spots where it seemed the underlying white paint from the previous painting was showing thru, so we put a second coat  on the center part of the plates (staying away from the edges).