networking

Fishing wires is a nightmare and is really individualized to each home

Like my house is a modular home built in the 80s so there’s a big cavity in the center of the house where they joined the two halves together. My networking gear is in the basement so getting the first floor wired was pretty simple, but the second floor was much harder. It was easiest to run all the cables up through that central cavity to the small space under the roof and then back down into each room. Took way more cable this way but I did it with 0 cutting into walls

Get a decent quality fish tape. You don’t have to go crazy. Harbor freight has them for like $40. Based on my old place that didn’t have a giant central wall cavity: get good at patching drywall. It sucks but it’s inevitable. Good news is if you’re a homeowner this is a skill you’ll absolutely want to have down

You’ll have to spend a little bit getting a lay of the land. What is current situation, what do things look like? Keep in mind for a house that’s 60+ years old you will run into stupid bullshit (I sure did).

Also consider what you want from your network. Planning things out beforehand makes things much easier. Also remember it’s very viable to buy old e waste networking gear. My rack is filled with stuff I got from recyclers and auctions for crazy cheap. Like my main switch is 48 gb ports and 5 10gb ports and it was $30. My poe switch and my fiber switch were similar. I never spent over $70 for anything.

I ran fiber to key points and spent the extra time running extra Ethernet drops for poe cameras. The latter was a fucking pain but my old place had WiFi cameras and they dropped out all the time. The poe cameras were cheaper, I actually covered all the poe gear by selling the WiFi cameras even though I needed more plus a poe switch, and they always just work. The fiber was a bit extravagant but it’s really nice to be able to send files between pcs on lan basically instantly. I only have gigabit so it’s way overkill but someday if this garbage country ever invests in infrastructure I’ll be ready. I technically can get up to 4gig Internet now but it’s crazy expensive

Cable is cheap, Always run 2 even if you only terminate one. .

Consider your crawl spaces and access first. Note where your plumbing is routed in the walls. Use a stud finder to help locate where the frame is at and how it is shaped. If there is already an outlet for any kind of electrical, don't get stupid drilling holes or using power tools. Cut holes for receptacles in sheetrock using one of the wooden handled hand saws made for the task because you're likely to feel an obstruction before you make a mistake and cut or puncture something. Get shielded wire. Every connector in the line is a problem for signal integrity.

if there is any coax already ran, MOCA is pretty reliable and robust

Is fiber an option where you live? Im in a 1940 home, got a 500mb fiber connection and the modem/router box and that's it. From my basement a floor below the router I get 500 up and down through wifi with <10ms latency. After testing that I didn't bother running wire anymore. No repeaters or special antennas and plenty of speed everywhere.

I bought a 1959 and wish I had gone further with my remodeling than I did, and I took out all the floor down to the studs in the main level and filled everything with soundproofing insulation before redoing the subfloor with 1 and a 1/4 inchs of OSB that I glued and compression screwed to the joists. One thing I'm very happy I did do was run Ethernet to most rooms while the floor was open, having all go to a central hub in the utility room where they're connected to switches, one for the upstairs network, one for the basement network since I also made the basement a separate apartment. Long way to say I wish I had planned out every repair and remodel and upgrade I could think of before ever touching a hammer so I could just do all the demo and remodeling at once. Now I'm stuck wishing I could go back and redo all the old electrical and plumbing before I had done all the finish work. Learn from me young one!