Blimey this was a hot one. This morning I managed to get the trunking on the cable in the garage coming from the study so that is looking a lot neater now. This afternoon I decided to attack the loft cabling. I pulled 9 cables through from the loft to the spare room, then pushed them through the hole in to the garage. Once they’d been punched in to the patch panels at either end, my cable tester informed me I’d only damaged one cable… not bad going for me! So eight cables between the garage and the loft ready to be used in the future. I also screwed the loft patch panel to the rafters and tidied up the wall cabinet in the garage, labelling all of the port so I know where they go.

I also wall mounted an 8-way surge protected power supply underneath the cabinet – I figured it would avoid taking up room inside the cabinet and also be safer for when I plug in transformers if I leave the power outside. Tasks for another include: labelling the loft patch panel, moving the server and switch to the cabinet and patching everything in, installing a wireless access point in the loft, moving my backup NAS to the loft, and sorting out those holes in the spare room.

Most of the parts have turned up now thanks to various sellers on ebay so I figured it was time to make a start. The first task was to bolt the cabinet to the garage wall. I found some decent ‘heavy duty’ wall fixings in B&Q which consist of a bolt and a metal wall plug which expands to fill the drilled hole as you tighten it up. This took some effort using a spanner instead of a screwdriver but I think it was worth it as the cabinet is definitly not going anywhere fast. 

Once the cabinet was up, I thought I’d start easy. Cables in to the study only need to go through the the wall underneath the cabinet and mean I can save the loft wiring for another day. One massive hole later and it was time to start cabling again:

And finally, after much fiddling about with the wall ports and patch panel here’s the finished result. I haven’t shown you the result in the garage yet because I’m not too happy with the tidyness of the cabling up the wall to the cabinet – I think some nice trunking is required.