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Rewiring Your Home Phone System?
the_2nd_coming asks: "Back when I moved into my house, the phone system was in need of immediate upgrade. The house was built in 1964, and it still had the original spaghetti phone lines running through the walls. The phone jacks were in odd places, and to top it all off, the line would melt after I would dial up to my ISP. I took immediate and drastic action. I pulled all the phone wires out of the walls, patched over the holes where the jacks use to be, and started drilling. I bought 2000 feet of Cat5 (I was going to be putting in a home network in the future). A day later, I was cursing and bitching because the old phone system used a 3 screw junction box to connect the house to the phone company, making it very difficult to have multiple jacks.What is the best way to rewire my phone system so that adding an extra 2 or 3 jacks would not be such a chore?"
"I eventually got all the wires hooked up, but very poorly due to the shoddy junction box. Since then I have added a phone jack, and will be adding 2 more in preparation for DirecTV service. My problem is that I did not set up the system to be expandable: just adding one jack was a hack job, and with 2 more on the way I have decided it is time to rewire this system with expandability in mind. I have looked around at Home Depot and Radio Shack, but all their solutions seem sub-par."
Mod up the parent.
My house was built in 1982. For whatever reason the original builder/buyer overlooked a couple of small things -- like phone jacks and cable (cable is somewhat understandable, but phone jacks?!?!). Every single phone jack was wired to a surface mount receptacle. The one in the kitchen was punched up through the pantry and through both sides of a wall to get to the kitchen.
I got a 110 block from my brother-in-law (if you're not so lucky, RadioShack, CompUSA, and Best Buy carry them. Best price will probably be from eBay though -- used ones work just fine), put it in a central location, ran the cable from the demarc to it (it wasn't long enough, but 3M has some cheap patch buttons for doing this kind of thing; work fine), and every place I put in phone jacks was run to the network closet (cable and cat5 are run there too). It's made adding more jacks easy, and I've gone from 3 poorly wired phone jacks to over a half dozen well wired ones (and I still need to add a couple, but drilling the holes is non-trivial for these locations).
Do yourself a favor -- everywhere you want to put in a phone jack run the cable for the phone, 1 or 2 coax (RG-6 Quad Shield only!), and 2 cat5 (for network) at the same time. The difficult bit is always running the cable. Get it all done at once - it's just as easy to pull 5 cables as it is to pull one. I used Leviton wallplates and connectors... they're a bit expensive, but work well. If you need to drill through wood, do yourself a favor and get an auger bit -- spade bits take forever, and if you're drilling through joists the cleanliness of the hole doesn't matter much (note -- US electrical code does not require low voltage cables to run through the joists; you can staple them to the bottom of the joist).
I do have my limits though. That wire is still punched up into the pantry and through two walls into the kitchen. It works.