I spent yesterday afternoon doing something amazing:
rewiring CAT5e outlets! I’m proud of
this achievement, so I’m going to perform a miraculous feat by telling my
exciting tale to everyone (the Internet) and no one (readers of my blog) at the
same time!
It all started with the Blu-ray player in the bedroom, the
Smart, wireless Blu-ray player. I’ve
been having problems with it streaming from Amazon for a while and have tried
multiple fixes to get it to work properly.
My last ditch effort was to use the device in its wired (rather than wireless) capacity. The main problem: this would involve me rewiring the bedroom’s CAT5e port. The house was run with CAT5e line (rather than older homes that were run with traditional phone wire), but the
TWO WHOLE outlets the builders installed were installed with phone jacks (not
Ethernet ports. You know how a phone jack is much smaller than an Ethernet jack? Yeah, that was a problem). We had initially solved the whole “we
only have two phone jacks in this entire house?” problem by getting a wireless
phone with one plugged-in base and two extensions phones that don’t need to be plugged
into a jack. Yes, we’re oh so clever.
So the jack in the bedroom was wired (theoretically) with
CAT5e—hey, just because it says CAT5e on the jack means….well, just about jack
to me after seeing the other...creative decisions the builders made. So I need to open up outlet/jack to see if it
was phone wire (RJ11) or CAT5e wire (RJ45).
It was, in fact, RJ45. Now I knew
what I was dealing with (meaning: I had some approximate knowledge of what I
might want to do in this situation, as long as Google could supply enough instructions in pictorial form). I was nearly ready for a trip to the store. But....
When Jon and I had the basement finished last summer, we ran cable and CAT5e wire before the drywall and ceiling were finished and had the electricians hook them up in a box for us--a box with a cable outlet and an Ethernet outlet. Smart thinking, huh? It was. It was very smart thinking. Except that we haven't used it yet, and before I made my trip to Home Depot, I decided to check out the wiring of the box. My hunch that it might not be properly hooked up was confirmed--hey, I tend to be a little suspicious when it comes to anything related to that project, BUT it's only because so much went wrong on the project! Back to my hunch: the ETHERNET jack had been hooked up for phone service. So, I would need to figure out how to rewire that (again, Google to the rescue).
It took me about 3 hours to accomplish the task, killing my fingers on little cable wires and destroying my back as I hunched into unnatural positions. But at the end, both CAT5e-wired outlets had functioning Ethernet ports. Woo hoo!
This is all great, but remember my initial reason for doing this: Blu-ray player/Amazon streaming issues. Now that it was a wired device, the problem would be solved.
Right?
Right?
Wrong.
But hey, if our wireless ever goes down, we now have functioning Ethernet ports!
