During the summer (and most of fall) of 2007 I spent much time, sweat, pain, blood, and cash rehabing a row-home in Baltimore, MD. One of the ultimate goals I had was to create a fantastic communications infrastructure throughout the house - one that would last for years to come, carry almost any amount of voice, data or video. In short: a hard-wired Ethernet network throughout the house.

At the heart of this lies the telecom closet. That's the place where all the wiring comes together, where all the outside sources spread their digital goodness to every room of the house, and where I get to exercise my own flavor of physical and logical security.

Here's the run-down on what I put behind the walls while I was reconstructing the interior of the house:

• Sixteen CAT5e ports spread around five rooms of the house
• Three coaxial cables run to three rooms of the house
• One PSTN (telephone) line run in from outside

All of these were run down into my root-cellar of a basement and layed in dirt for a long time while I finished the creature comforts of the place. I clamped some ends on three of the CAT5e cables so I had minimal connectivity to a few of the rooms and jammed it all next to my tools for a few months. Embarassing way to run a shop.

All the cables from the upper floors end-run down into the basement. Blue is STP CAT5e Ethernet, white is 75ohm coax.		Here's three CAT5e cables I specially clamped with ends so my DSL modem could keep me entertained. Hella mess.

Let's get a few questions out of the way.

First, why shielded CAT5e? No particular reason, honestly. I everywhere I ran the CAT5e, I kept it 12" to 18" away from power cable, and only crossed them at right angles. Even though I did that, I'd never forgive myself if I encountered electrical interference after the drywall went up. And besides, if you're ultra-paranoid (I'm not, but should be...) you can rest assured that no one can measure the electrical signals radiating off your network cable to evesdrop on you. Loser.

Second, why only three runs of coax? I've got one cable hook-up in each bedroom, and one for the living room. More can easily be added downstairs (by running it up through the floor), but I felt one per room was enough. Just personal preference.

Third, PSTN? Who the hell uses a "telephone" anymore?! I don't. But, I do like the ADSL2+ from Cavalier Telecom. It's so much cheaper than Comcast, and Verizon started rate limiting their DSL customers during peak hours (although they'd never admit it), so this works well. I also need it for my home's security system.

Let's take a look at where the closet will be built. It's a little out-of-the-way storage area underneath the box-winder portion of my stairs. Excellent central location, easy to reach if necessary, dry and clean.

A little hard to work in, but the result is nice. Need to bring up all the cabling from the basement, bring in 120v power, and add distribution hardware. I've already removed the wood panel that covered the brick against the back/side of the closet.

Notta-lotta-headroom, but I can easily fill this with a switch, router, gateway, and a few terabytes of media goodness.		Drilled multiple holes to the basement. 120v power to the left, everything else to the right of the 2x6 stud.

Back to the basement. Remember the mess of cables coming down out of a vertical bulkhead built to house the HVAC ducting, water and sewer pipes? After I cleaned those all up I realized it's time to hang them from the ceiling for safety. I had a butt-load of 3" PVC pipe hangers/straps left from the plumbing work - they're perfect for this job, and cheap.

Still avoiding close runs with electrical wires, the CAT5e and coax sits nicely in the pipe hangers.		I need to tighten this up, but that's later, after everything gets pulled upstairs. Oh, this is where it goes upstairs.

See those timbers used to make the floors in this house?! Damn! This place was built in 1876, and I swear, they used the wood from the ships they came over on to make the place. It's old dimensional lumber, and measures in at about a 3x8 true size. That's about twice the girth of today's building materials. This has nothing to do with the telecom closet, though.

Once all the cables were run across the ceiling of the basement with the pipe hangers, I ran them, one at a time, slowly, painfully, tediously, up the multiple holes I drilled from the closet area upstairs. There was a lot of excess. My bad.

Holy crap.		Some wrap over to the other side of the stairs.		Nice. Everyone enjoys a good haircut once in a while.

Notice the colorful tape on the ends of the CAT5e cable? I used multiple rolls of colored electrical tape to mark the ends while running it. So, for each run inside the wall, each end is color-coordinated. Sweet. My OCD is now satisfied. When trimming the cable, don't cut off too much! You'll want to punch it down later in a comfortable position, and if you ever need to remove the distribution block in the future you'll need the excess back there so you can pull it out.

The next thing to tackle is the actual wood panel that holds everything we need. It needs to be measured and cut well to present a clean, professional finish.

Use the punch-down block, low-voltage, coax plate, and old-work box to draw a cutting template.		I cut the holes with a RotoZip and finished them out with a set of files I had if I under-cut the sizes.

In the pictures above you'll see I used the actual components for the closet as template guides. From the left, a 24-port CAT5e punch-down block, two "old work" low-voltage boxes (orange), a coax wall plate (white) and a 2-gang high voltage "old work" box (blue). I used old work boxes because I wasn't nailing anything into a stud - the old work boxes provide hinges that tighten down to secure the box to the wall after you've inserted it. Genious!

Power to the people...		... and outlets to the power.

Needing some power in the telecom closet, I found the last outlet on the wall was actually also the last outlet in the entire circuit for that particular run. So, I ran off it and made the telcom closet the end-of-run. Ok, normally you'd want your own circuit in the closet, but running one from the breaker box would have been a total bitch and taken forever, and most likely killed me when I licked the center bar and got 200amps shoved backward through my head. Anyway, this particular circuit only had three wall outlets on it, so there was plenty of amperage to go around.

Disclaimer: If you don't have experience in electrical wiring or are unsure of how the hell to do something like this, then don't. Call a professional. You can get a nasty shock (I've done that), burn your house down, or die if you screw this up.

Now all that's really left is to punch-down all the CAT5e into the distribution block, screw on some ends to the coax cable, and secure it all down!

This is so...		... freaking tedious.

Although I neglected to take any pictures of me punching down the CAT5e cable into the distro block, I want to point out that the more you do it, the easier and faster it becomes. Make sure you've got a punch-down tool, preferbily with a cutting edge to remove the excess copper wire from your work. Feed the cable back into the hollow of the wall (all that excess gets in the way, but you need it). Also, for the ends of the coax cable I simply twisted on some standard ends you can buy at your local home-improvement store. More on these below.

Here's what we end up with...

1. 120v AC power. A two-gang box gives us four outlets which is plenty for what I need. A switch, a DSL modem, a router, and a server. 2. Coax cable to the house's rooms. These three are un-broken runs straight to outlets in the bedrooms and living room. 3. Three CAT5e ports (blue) that connect directly to the distro block, and the single PSTN/telephone port (black) used exclusively for the DSL modem. 4. Coax cable run to the outside of the house. Used to bring in cable television, sweet free over-the-air digital TV, or whatever. In the future I'll add a splitter that will take that signal to the three connections above in #2. 5. The big-daddy CAT5e distribution block. Each used port is a single run to a port in a wall somewhere in the house. This is where all the communications of the house comes together!

Don't laugh at the setup, man. I'm still reeling from the cost of the entire house's rehab, so yes, that's what it looks like. A cheap re-pruposed eMachines junker holding a 1/2 terabyte drive sitting next to a dumbed-down Linksys switch/router device. I'm soon to upgrade my other computers, and when I do a 16-port gigabit switch and something I can load DD-WRT onto will come in to replace those. Get off my back.

Much cleaner.		Safe from the Roomba.

I really need some right-sized patch-cables, too. When I have all sixteen ports running I don't want a rats nest in there.

Thanks for looking over this project! Maybe some day I'll actually get around to posting an entire tutorial on how to rehab your very own Baltimore heroine den. Until then, feel free to shoot me a note: snoop [at] infinitel00p.com