So I decided to drop some lines last nite…what a disaster.

First, I tried to run the fish up the wall from the box at the floor level.  Fishing wire from one little hole to another little hole doesn’t work.  So I went up into the attic to find the hole there, so I could grab the fish.  No go there either.  In order to service the AC unit up there, the rafters are covered with these hard-as-fuck boards that are nailed to the rafters.  And just my luck, the wire I need not only goes under this little floor, but drops right in the goddamn middle of the floor.  Under me, that is.

So I painstakingly pull up the L-shaped support board only to find that I can’t manipulate the board up in the attic.  There’s just not enough room; I had to saw the board in half to move the part I needed to get at the wire drop.  I need to post pics of this at some point…because the amount of work involved in dropping 2 lines down a wall in this house is ludicrous. When I finally get to the wiring under my feet *grumble* I find not a straight drop down the wall, but a 3/8″ hole to drop cable down.  To make things worse, the coax is somehow stapled/nailed to the studs all the way down the wall, so I can’t just pull that up, drop two lines and split it.  No, the existing coax *has* to stay there.  This isn’t that much of a catastrophe; I’ll probably leave the cable in place so I can run satellite to the living room some day in the future…for, uh…free-to-air programming using the dish that was already on my house.  God though, what a pain in the ass.

So I reverse plan and start snaking cable down the wall.  Now if you’ve ever seen the back of a utility box, it has 4 holes in the back, in the corners, that are about the size of the cable I’m running through them.  Great.  So I went all Tim the tool man Taylor on that shit and ripped the box out of the wall, damaging the drywall above it.  That’s only an hour repair job, but still.  Anyway, 2 5 inch nails later and a lot of careful (not careful enough, apparently) wriggling of the box, the box dangles outside the wall.

Anyway, 5 hours later, I have an RG6 and a CAT5e in the wall, and a gaping hole from where the box was.  I need to pick up another new work bracket, a 3-module plate, and another RG6 module.  Oh, and some drywall repair supplies.

God I’m starting to hate home improvement projects.  I need to get this shit done so I can set up my new Airport Extreme and go back to playing Ratchet and Clank.