What and Where

The first thing you need to do is to make a list of activities vs. locations. I did mine in a spreadsheet, but paper and pencil will work just fine. Figure 1 is a simplified floorplan for the upper level of my two-level home, which you'll need to make sense of its corresponding list in Table 1.

Figure 1: Upper Level Room layout

My list has columns for Primary and Secondary activities, which can also be thought of as the "must haves" and "would be nices". The general approach used was that Primary Activities had to be supported via "traditional" wired distribution, but alternative technologies (wireless, power line, etc.) were ok to use for Secondary Activities. The "greyed out" areas are those that didn't need to be included in the plan.

Figure 2 and Table 2 show the floorplan and list for the lower level. The home is built on a hillside lot, so the Laundry, Utility, Storage and Crawl(space) areas are below grade, with the rest of the rooms on the lower level having daylight access.

Figure 2: Lower Level Room layout

Tags: Design, Home Network, How To, LAN, wiring,

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