Today is the first day that I’ve ever been in our attic.
Well, I’ve stood on a ladder with my head in the little hole before, typically just long enough to decide, “Nope!” and figure out something else to do that didn’t involve combining my fears of heights and enclosed spaces and falling through the ceiling and breaking any number of limbs…
But today I actually had to go inside because I wanted to finally get the cable for our wifi access point off the floor and mount it to the ceiling properly.
I’ve watched a lot of videos of people running cabling through their attics, so I figured it wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but little did I know that falling through the ceiling is only one of many things one has to worry about in the attic! The big one is, well, attics aren’t really designed for larger people to fumble about up there – between all of the insulation and air ducts and random ceiling joists, it’s not like there’s just a straight shot across the house up there and there certainly wasn’t any standing room like I’d seen on YouTube! I found tons of dividers (firewalls?) and just extremely cramped quarters and exposed nails and sharp metal to avoid, but by the time I’d mustered the nerve to get up there I was determined to see it through.
Even though I had drilled my hole from the other side and shoved a bunch of the wire through, I hadn’t thought about the insulation hiding everything so I had a hard time finding where I was supposed to be going until I finally had my wife grab a pole and tap on the ceiling where I needed to go … which at that point was almost comical because not only had I been climbing in the wrong direction in the attic, but it was literally only a couple of feet from the hole whereas I had to have been somewhere in the middle of the living room by that point.
The other end of the cable needed to run into our bedroom closet which is where all of the servers are located, which also ended up being a chore because I guess you never think about how all of these unique ledges and shapes are represented in the actual walls behind the drywall. In this case, there’s this weird “inverse ledge” in our closet where part of the ceiling is lower than the rest … which is where I had originally wanted to run the wire through because it would put it in the corner and as out of the way as possible.
It turned out, though, that I think said weird ledge is actually a wooden box inside of the wall, so again I couldn’t find the wire that I had fished through. After more tapping, Sara finally suggested that I just make a new whole a lot closer where it would be easy to find so that I could get out of the attic already and be done with it, so I listened to my wife and about five minutes later I was done!
By then I was thoroughly covered with fiberglass particles that are even now after a shower still lingering, but it’s done and I’m very glad that I don’t have to do anything else up there. In fact, I’ve got another cable running to the TV that I want to hide and I honestly think that I might just drill a hole right through the wall like I did into my office on the other side of the closet rather than deal with the attic anymore.
And when we build our next house, I’m definitely having the builders pre-wire everything with ethernet in every room at the highest grade we can to try and future proof it because if I struggled this much going into the attic at 41, I can only imagine trying to do it again at 55!!!
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