Monday, February 13, 2012

He's flying over our heads in a million pieces!

Because we're painting the house, Greg felt like it was time to finally fix this nonsense that Comcast foisted on us.

Cables across the front of our house.


Cables across our threshold.


Cables across our chimney and across the side of the house . . .


. . . which came in the ceiling of our basement and ran across the length of the room because Comcast doesn't care what your house or rooms or cables look like when they are charging you $85 an hour to give you overpriced cable and Internet service.


So Greg donned this suit, crawled into our scary crawlspace, and ran the cables the right way.



He cheerfully informed me every time he found another spider egg sac, ensuring that I will never ever get in there to help him.


But sometimes your dude is in the crawl space and you're in the office, trying to fish a cable out of the wall and you're trying to figure out where the fuck he is, and you keep tap-tap-tapping on the floor, as if that will help, and he's like, "Heather, that's not helping. I'm underneath the bathtub pipes and I can't hear anything," and sometimes you drill too many holes in the wall trying to figure it out.


But that's okay because I am good at patching holes. Or I am willing. And that's a good thing because we made a LOT of holes in the basement.


I don't even want to explain what happened here, but it involved an unexpected horizontal beam that necessitated a six-inch hole in the middle of the wall, the purchase of a 45-degree drill attachment, and more patching. But we now have a hard-wired ethernet connection to the basement and the office and Greg has plans to install network drops in every room of the house, but probably through the attic next time.

Oddly, my sewing kit came in handy with all of this work. We used the forceps my mother gave me (super handy for sewing AND retrieving cables from the wall), safety pins for attaching the Cat 6 cable to the fish tape, and a seam ripper for undoing all of our safeguards with string.

We're so tired but we have almost no visible cables on the outside of our house and Greg can copy files quickly between his XBOX and his computer and I didn't care about any of this, but it was great to be the helper instead of the instigator, for once. And now I don't have to feel bad when I inform Greg that we're spending next weekend removing sod, right?

(Hat tip to Jess for the Willy Wonka reference in the post title.)

10 comments:

  1. Of course you have to make extra holes in your walls, that's just how the house breathes. I make them every time I hang a picture, at least three or four extra ones beyond what's needed. It helps.

    What an abomination comcast made of the original cable installation! Much better now, and you have guaranteed future help for your sod project too. Good work.

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  2. Ha! I am totally going to use that excuse from now on. Old houses need to breathe!

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  3. That all sounds sadly familiar...oh, days spent on such things are what being a homeowner is all about, isn't it ;-) I spent most of the day yesterday ripping up sod in our front parking strip...man, am I sore!

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  4. Ugh, ripping out sod is the worst! But hooray--that means new plant combinations to ogle!

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  5. Ridiculous cabling! Worse than ours, which goes across a chimney, over a a privacy wall on the deck (rather than simply under the deck), along the deck/house junction, etc...
    Looking forward to redoing that mess. Eventually.

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  6. Right--why would you go under a deck when you could make it visible from space? It makes me long for the days of giant antennas on rooftops.

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  7. Comcast....I didn't know they were torturing the nation as far as Oregon. They're based in Philly...I work across the street from their main building. They are a nightmare here, too, if that makes you feel any better. I can't believe how haphazardly they wired your house, but good for you to making it right!

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  8. Adding insult to injury, they don't caulk any of the gigantic holes that they leave in the side of your house, allowing the outside elements in. In our neighborhood they are our only option, which is really frustrating.

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  9. Willy Wonka was my hangover movie in college. You're welcome!

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  10. Ugh. Comcast's "Professional Installation" is the WORST!

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