One last job before the plasterboard on the end wall of the dining room went on: to move the internet. Grandiose expression perhaps, this is in fact just moving the phone line from where it enters the house. It snakes in through a hole in the front window frame then drops down into a little junction box where it was extended to the other side of the window (for poorly understood reasons). We'd asked the electrician to put a chase in for a phone connection and two ethernet ports in the utility so that we could get all that stuff out of the way. He had duly done this, with three comms wires running up to the ceiling.
Where they came out, nobody knows! Also, the sparky had decided to piss off. As in, properly just stop doing electrical work. And he hadn't finished. By a long stretch. This is something we'd thought was the preserve of high drama on Grand Designs, when the contractor goes bust and everything falls through. It turns out it's fairly common. So too is the sporadic and tiny amounts of work they stretch out. Four to five days we had been told. This had already turned into 5 days stretched out over nearly three whole months. We're putting all this into the 'lessons learnt' box.
Nonetheless, we had three ends of wires in the walls but no other ends. Which is quite curious. After hunting around the rooms, particularly the ones we'd asked the wires to go to there was still no sign of their exits. The only thing to do then is follow what we could see. This was merely up the utility wall and presumably into the bathroom above.
Out came the crowbar and after prying up half a dozen boards we found three 100m reals of cable nestled between the joists. Not very helpful. After a bit of reading up on what to do with data cables around power cables we got cracking with putting them through holes and generally doing what we thought we were paying our electrician to do.
It's perhaps a little unsurprising just how tangled 100m of cable can get. Suffice to say that 4 hours in to Saturday, we'd finally (and a little behind schedule) managed to sort things out. One phone line to the front, one ethernet to the Hall and one waiting to be taken upstairs.
It might also be noted that in stamping on a floorboard to re-seat it, a nail may have accidentally punctured a central heating pipe resulting in spurting water. Just maybe. And it might have taken half an hour to drain down the system, cut the pipes and fit and solder a sleeve on top to fix it. Sorry Beth.
The actual moving of the internet is a piece of cake. It's just two wires. Simply unscrew two terminals, put the new cable in and join the old plug up at the other end. Hey-presto, you've moved your internet!
And with that a new piece of plasterboard could go up.
