www.jerrystout.us

The only thing I can say about this is Wow, shake my head in disbelief, and bow down to the almighty house – it kicked our ass today. Well, for the most part.

Attempt I

Here’s what was “supposed” to have happened. Austin was going to come over at 10:30AM, before it got way to hot up in the attic. At 11:30 I sent him a text message asking if he was on central time and got a response of “my bad”. Not only was he late, he had forgotten about coming over completely. Anyway he showed up around noon, with the sun directly overhead blazing down on the rooftop. For the uninitiated to Florida summers and attics, you don’t go up in them unless it’s early morning or late at night unless you have a huge attic fan ventilating that heat out – 140 degrees is common without those fans. Even a lot of the professionals won’t do it except early in the morning, like A/C guys and cable installers. Austin was asking for it, he just didn’t know it yet. 

We get the ladder in position and I hand him a flashlight and network cable, and up he goes. He didn’t even make it to the top of the ladder before he started bitching about the heat. This was going to be funny, I could tell already.

He gets up there and starts heading over towards the fireplace, with Very minimal crawl space and a LOT of nails sticking out from the shingles being attached I guess. After a little bit of cussing and complaining he makes it. I’m sitting in the living room having a smoke, watching TV, and sipping on a Fresca in front of an A/C vent waiting on him to get over there.

I had pre-drilled a hole in the wall and ran the fish tape up there as far as I could until I could hear it hitting something and left it there. Austin will figure out what it’s hitting when he gets up there I thought, he’s the one with the flashlight. Well it turns out the tape was hitting the 2×4 – the top of the wall framing. Damn, as many home improvement shows as I’ve seen and I forgot that tops of wall frames have boards that the studs attach to. Identical ones on the bottom too ! So much for that idea and I tell him to come on down, this idea isn’t going to work. I take another swig from the Fresca can, waiting on him … again.

Attempt II

We regroup and try and figure out an alternate plan. This time we decide to at least try and get the other end of the cable ran into the office where it’s supposed to plug into the router. There’s a coaxial cable and another network cable already dropped down and coming out the wall in the office so this should be simple. If the cable guy and the security system guy can do it then certainly we can. I took the fish tape in there again and poked it in the same hole as the other two and started pushing it up inside the wall with Austin up there waiting on it, dripping in sweat and about to pass out. I pushed it up as far as it would go and whadda ya know, it starts hitting something. Yeah, another friggin’ 2×4 ! The previous installers drilled a tiny hole in the 2×4 to run the existing wires through and unless you have a PhD in fish tape navigation you can forget about hitting that little hole. I pushed and prodded the tape around up in the wall for a little bit. Long enough to get the Tape hooked on something inside the wall and get it stuck. Awesome ! Austin needs to come down for air again and now we had to figure this part of it out. While he was trying to cool off and rehydrate I just cut the damn fish tape off and pushed it back into the wall. No harm, no foul, and I now have a 40′ tape instead of a 50′ tape – one I just bought the day before.

Attempt III

Austin noticed when he was up there that there was a lot of slack in the coax cable, enough to where I could pull it into the office and attach the network cable to it and he could pull it back up into the attic – hell yeah, this part was going to work ! Not. Manipulating a 100′ network cable up in a crawl space that’s coiled is no easy task (think reusing Christmas lights), network cables get tangled up enough when you’re trying to uncoil a 20′ one on a wide open floor. It’s a conspiracy, it has to be. I’m just glad we didn’t have a big attic fan or the entire neighborhood would have heard every explicative known to man coming from the inside of our roof. After a few $&#@$!’s and @*&%!$’s we realized this wasn’t going to work either. Austin comes back down out of the attic looking like a big ball of cotton candy from all the insulation stuck to him and his sweaty skin. I should have had a camera. Damn you bastard pieces of wood !!!

Attempt IV (Realization of Defeat)

We both silently admitted to defeat and took the easy way out. I drilled two holes in the ceiling in the least noticeable corners of the living room and office and it was done in about 10 minutes. Now there’s only 70′ of extra network cable to hide that’s outside the ceiling and I have to go buy some of those wire track things to hide exposed wiring. The type you use when you wall-mount a flat panel TV to hide the cable and A/V wires, just a lot more of it. The first thing Susan said was, “You drilled holes in my ceiling.” She could give a crap about what my project is for or what it took to get there – there are holes in her ceiling. I’ll hear about them for quite a while to come, trust me.

Lessons Learned:

1. NEVER get a job that involves running any type of cables in an attic in Florida that have to go down inside the deadspace in a wall and come out. Not unless you’re a cabling magician.

2. NEVER say “network cable” and “30 minute job” in the same sentence when it involves and attic.

3. NEVER jam a fish tape with a hook on the end up into a wall when you have no idea what else is inside the wall.

4. NEVER leave a tall ladder directly under the attic opening if you have Siamese cats – they are quite adept at ladder climbing. To hell with Dalmations, fire fighters need to get Siamese cats. If we could only teach Siamese to run around up in attics with network cables in their mouth the world of data cabling would be a much, much better place.

5. ALWAYS opt for the wireless solution if at all possible if it involves attics and running wires.

… and lastly …

6. NEVER agree with your friend if he says, “I’ll let you borrow my pressure washer if you come do a network cable drop for me … in my attic, in the middle of a Florida summer.”

1. bobbie says:

   July 27, 2009 at 09:51

   Really humorous. Good writing ! I would like to have watched this.

   You`ve probably seen the last of Austin, for a little while.
2. Smooth Ceilings says:

   July 27, 2009 at 21:15

   I learned many years ago that any home improvement job will generally take twice as long as you originally think it will.
3. Amy Austin says:

   July 28, 2009 at 11:52

   This is too funny!!! It made my day!! I heard the story from John that same day but was not nearly as good as this!!