Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Father's Day Phones

     When my dad built the garage located on our property 30+ years ago, he ran a two conductor cable from the house so that he could install some phones in the garage. Needless to say, that never happened... until this past weekend. My parents recently found some corded phones at a yard sale and they rekindled my dad's interest in wiring the phones in the garage. Read on to see what I did.

It lives!


     The first thing I had to do was hook up the phone line on the house side. I was able to route it through the ceiling tiles from the laundry room (where it leaves through underground conduit to the garage) to the next room over where there is another corded phone on the wall. Unfortunately, that phone is mounted on a stone wall and it took a great deal of time to fish the cable between the wall and the stone. I ended up doing it by attaching two pieces of twine to the end of the cable that was originally attached to the phone and then pulling the cable up through to the ceiling. I then disconnected one piece of twine and used the other to pull the original phone line back down (There wasn't enough room to bring both the old and the new cable down at the same time, hence two pieces of twine). The free piece of twine was then used to pull the new phone line down with minimal trouble. The two conductors on the new phone line will connect to the red and green wires on the old phone once all is said and done.

     The next step was to run the wiring in the garage. The phone line enters the garage near the front so I split it into two runs to connect to the two phones that will be installed in the garage. The first phone is located at the man door entrance to the garage. I mounted the phone and ran a RJ11 line to the ceiling where I created a simple bracket to hold a in-wall phone jack that I used to connect the RJ11 cable to a DSL line filter to the phone jack to the cable that then runs into the house. The second telephone was installed at the top of the stairs on the second floor. The line was also ran along the ceiling then through the framework so that the staircase walls could someday be finished. That line runs through the wall to another in-wall phone jack and DSL line filter to the second phone. I then connected the line from the garage to the house phone and everything worked as it should. The two days of work was totally worth it knowing that I got to finally assemble something that was 30 years in the making. Happy Father's Day, Dad!

 
Phone located near the front entrance

Bracket holding the in-wall phone jack and line filter

 
The intersection of the three phones

Up from the first floor

 
These cable clips are fantastic

Phone located on the top of the stairs on the second floor

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