Back in April I decided to take a well-earned break from work. During that week, I got a lot accomplished. Mostly I worked on my software project (details to be revealed fairly soon, probably) but towards the end I started my first decorating project in my flat.

I wanted to do something a little different, and make the room look a little larger. I think when I was ill one time, with only daytime TV for entertainment, I caught one of those ’sell your house for more’ type programs. One thing they did when making the property into a showhome was add a touch of wallpaper, but not directly to the wall. Instead, a large sheet of thin MDF was covered in a short space of time, and the panel was then propped against the wall. Such a simple idea, but I’d never thought of it before.

So, I’ve taken that idea and built on it a bit. As you can see from the gallery below, I’ve done something on a bit of a larger scale, with the idea of it being a bit more permenant and interesting. I purchased a single roll of fancy wallpaper from wallpapers direct, built a wooden support frame, primed it, lined it, stripped the aforementioned lining from it (lining caused more problems than it solved), and finally covered it with some help from my wallpapering-veteran father.

The larger frame wasn’t just to make it more sturdy and more of a feature; it was key to creating a lighting feature. After much deliberation over the best and most cost-effective way to illuminate, I chose a rope light as the source of the backlighting effect. Lighting efficiency was optimised through a late decision to line it with plain ol’ kitchen foil.

As for the rest of the decoration (and the choice of wallpaper) I took cues from my existing bed set. The pallete ended up consisting of a range of blues, white, chrome and black. The key to putting them all together is varying levels of contrast. The eye is drawn to areas of high contrast, which not only allows you to highlight features but also can be used to provide a greater feeling of space by drawing the eye around the room in a particular manner. I’m just making this stuff up BTW, but it’s what I’ve based my decorating on and it appears to have worked pretty well

Being on a bit of a budget, the accessories had to come cheap. It’s possible to get away with this by sticking to a small pallette and taking advantage of contrast to make things look better than they really are. Anyway, enough writing. I was going to write a much more structured essay, but I’ll let the photos do the talking.

One thing that has been lacking since the first build of the rack is ventilation. With both sets of doors closed, the inside can get quite warm, especially when iron is turned on. Not any more though, having just completed the installation of 2 active ventilation zones, lighting and a low voltage power supply system complete with rack-mount control panel.

Air is drawn in at the bottom of the rack by 5 quiet 80mm 12v fans, positioned behind a perforated 2U panel inside the front panel of the base. The air is blown vertically into the cabinet from the bottom through a similar 1U perforated panel. Although the draught is barely noticeable, the difference it makes to temperatures at the front of the rack is significant.

With this ‘air curtain’ alone though, the back of the rack still gets very warm. To solve this I’ve installed a relatively huge 200mm ‘Big Boy’ fan into the newly-added top of the cabinet. This sucks out the warm air and dispenses it into the containing room. Together these fans keep the entire cabinet cool.

To power the fans I’ve used an old ATX power supply. In order to make replacement easy when the supply fails, no modifications have been made to it. Instead, I bought a 20-pin molex connector so that I could just plug the ATX connector straight into my system.

The PSU is connected to 4 switches that are mounted on a 1U blanking panel in the front of the rack. I wanted some fancy switches, so I splashed out on some nice chromed illuminated ones from China (via eBay). There’s one green DPDT switch, which switches the PSU on and off, and three blue SPDT switches which control power to the two fan systems and some lighting.

The lighting illuminates the front of the rack, and is there purely for decorative purposes. I had considered using cold-cathode tubes, but the seller that I got the switches from also sells strips of LEDs encased in a flexible transparent rubber-like substance. They are sold in various lengths, but I thought 96cm would be OK for what I wanted (at the time I bought it to experiment with, thinking that it could illuminate the wall behind my desk). This strip is now mounted on the left-hand front door.

I’ve finally gotten around to fixing the top to the rack cabinet. It’s made from the door of an old storage-only cabinet, which was actually a fridge/freezer cabinet from Ikea. The top has been cut into the correct proportions for a while, but has just sat cluttering my floor until now.

To allow the many cables to enter the cabinet a notch of approx 8cm square was cut out of one of the panels. These two panels could then be slid together without the need to disconnect any cabling already in place.

Unfortunately I’ve discovered that the top of the cabinet isn’t exactly square – it’s slightly warped, as the photo below shows when the top had been fixed. I’m not happy with this so at some point I’ll have to put some effort into correcting it. Next time I build a rack I’ll make the top and bottom in more of a similar manner, with a known square-angled piece on which to fit the timber supports.

The top currently has no ventilation, but that will change soon thanks to a lovely huge ‘Big Boy’ fan.

Today I added the final 4 network points – there are now a total of 24 around the house.

The wiring project started about 14 months ago, with the plan to have at least 2 network points in all rooms except the bathroom. The final distribution has ended up as:

• Living room: 6
• Dining room: 4
• Kitchen: 2
• Pantry: 4
• Landing: 2
• Bedroom 1: 4
• Bedroom 3: 2

Despite considering that 24 ports might be a little excessive, I’ve come to realise that 24 ports isn’t quite enough especially when it comes to distributing analogue audio & video over CAT5 (i.e. not as IP data) since at least one port is required for each A/V combination depending on the quality of the signal desired. The living room should probably have 4 more ports, the kitchen could do with at least 2 more and a couple by the front door would come in useful for security purposes.

I’ve learnt a lot from the experience of doing this wiring, such as how to lift floorboards, that lathe & plaster ceilings are extremely fragile and plastering is nowhere near as easy as it looks.

Running the cables before moving in was certainly a good idea. It would have taken me probably another 12 months otherwise to get to this stage. It’s taken a lot more work than I expected, although the overall time is down to being in a lazy, bored and/or apathetic mood most weekends. I’m glad I did it though – the ports have come in useful for the MythTV system, for the family computer and soon enough the whole-house audio system. I’m also using them to trial some IP video cameras.

I’ve finally managed to find somewhere to buy stuff to tidy up some of the cabling around the house. A couple of weeks ago I ordered some trunking and a cable tray (which will replace the improvised MDF/timber one I constructed from offcuts) from Minitran.

Unfortunately the first of two packages arrived late on a friday with only the larger items present – it appeared that the bubblewrap packaging (with no strong outer container) had disintegrated and spilled the smaller items somewhere along the delivery chain. The delivery company were mostly to blame for this, with the delivery driver not having the best attitude and the delivery not even being recorded on the paperwork which is probably why it was the last item to be delivered. The items should have been packed in something stronger but I guess such packaging is hard to come by for 3m x 30cm x 5cm consignments. I was also worried by the fact that my card payment had been manually entered into a PDQ machine, wihch suggests that my card number – submitted via the website – is being stored in plaintext somewhere. These days I would expect all online stores that accept card payments to do so via automated secured systems. Clearly this isn’t the case.

Anyway, I continued with installing what I had – the cable tray, a 3m length of 50×50mm trunking, and 2x 3m lengths of 25×38mm trunking.

The 50mm square trunking was used to tidy up the majority of cables that come through from downstairs. This required being fixed to the wall by screws, which wasnt too difficult. I used a hand mitre saw to make the 90 degree bends. I could have purchased corner joints, but they are over £7 each and would have gotten lost anyway. The mitre saw did a great job and the result looks neat.

After I had got the first lot of trunking installed I set to work on the cable tray. The tray is made from a steel wire mesh which is lighter than standard cable tray, looks fairly good and lets light through. The problem was, though, that I had to figure out how to securely mount it without using the steel rods and support brackets that had gone missing. I settled on doing what I had done with the improvised cable tray and used the picture rail to my advantage.

The tray had to be cut to size, about 50cm shorter than the 3m length. With the help of a dremmel this wasnt too hard. I initally left some spare length so that I could bend the wires around and then use them to fix the tray to the picture rail with screws. This didn’t quite work as I had hoped though. To bend the extra length I had to cut part-way through the wires and carefully bend them. I then intended to solder the bends to strengthen them up a little. This plan didn’t work, and I ended up removing the bent parts altogether.

Thanks to the tray being relatively light and strong it turned out that there was no need to fix it to the walls. Just resting on the picture rail keeps it secure enough.

The smaller trunking contains the cables from the other side of the house – from the pantry, bedroom 3 and the landing. This was self-adhesive so was a lot quicker to fit. The cables only just fitted inside though.

Once all of the trunking was installed, I re-ran all of the cables to the cabinet, tidying them as much as I could along the way. This involved lots of cable ties, spiral wrap and patience. As part of this, the remaining network cables were run to the cabinet and connected up to the patch panel. Unfortunatley the back of the patch panel is an unavoidable mess. At one point I thought of disconnecting, trimming and reconnecting the cables that were already connected but this proved far too difficult so I just tried to keep things as tidy as possible.

After clearing up the cables inside the cabinet, things look a lot neater in there (if you ignore the back of the patch panel). This makes it a lot easier to work around the back and portrays a more professional appearance.

There are two main wiring routes that are part of my ongoing project to wire up our house for A/V and data distribution – one goes from the bottom of my wardrobe directly down to the room below, and the other goes across a short stretch of the landing and down into the pantry.

Until yesterday, the 4 x speaker and 6 x CAT5 cables going to the pantry were laid under the carpet, then pushed down through a hole in a floodboard and the corresponding hole in the pantry ceiling. The reason for this was simply that it was too much work at the time to run the cables properly, i.e. beneath the floorboards. At the time when I was running the cables, we weren’t living in the house so I only had relatively short visits in which to do the work.

I spent most of yesterday improving the situation by pulling up flooadboards, drilling holes in joists and reaching around in the dirt. All but 2 of the cables that were fed under the carpet are now out of sight under the floorboards of the landing. The remaining 2 cables are CAT5 feeds to bedroom 3, which take a slightly different route to the main runs and are already connected at both ends.

The floor boards were lifted using a reciprocal saw, which cut through the thick ~100-year-old planks like a knife through butter that’s just come out of the fridge. The holes in the joists were mostly drilled using a 32mm drill bit, the largest I had available.

There was one close call with an unexpected mains cable which had been routed through the joist only a few millimetres from the floorboard I was cutting into. Fortunately the outer insulation was barely grazed.

Before the cables were re-routed, they had to be pulled back up through the pantry ceiling. As the photo below shows, this resulted in a lot of spaghetti! Running each cable individually allowed me to untangle the mess and straighten the cables out.

The speaker cables were run first since they are larger and heavier, and so naturally like to sit at the bottom of the holes. The CAT5 runs were pulled in the order that they come through the bedroom/landing wall, so as to keep them as neat as possible.

Now that the cables have been run, I can continue with the wiring project by adding the endpoints – the RJ45 sockets and speakers. More on the progress of this soon.

I have purchased the 2 amplifiers for this month from eBay, but haven’t got around to the ventilation improvements as yet.

The tiles arrived packed in a tower, and were a lot lighter than I expected. I have installed sound absorption material before, inside the HTPC case that used to house boron, but that was specifically designed for noise reduction within computers. This foam was much thinner but had several layers. The bottom layer was very high density and hence quite heavy. The weight is designed to dampen vibration in whatever it’s attached to as well as absorbing sounds. The foam for the cabinet is not layered but it’s much thicker at about 4cm. One of the larger surfaces is flat and the other has an egg-crate relief pattern which apparently prevents the formation of standing waves.

The tiles are normally attached using spray-on adhesive, but to keep costs down I decided to give my glue gun a go. However, since hot-melt glue is obviously a liquid when applying, the foam tended to absorb quite a lot of it rather than presenting it to the side panels to which the foam was being attached. The solution to this was to add more glue and only press very lightly and hold until the glue had cooled. Despite this method, I managed to use up 5 or 6 sticks – my entire supply – doing both sides of the cabinet.

24 tiles turned out to be the exact amount needed. I thought I might only use about 8, but 12 on each side fitted just right. Only 2 offcuts were made as a result of having to account for the 4-way power strip mounted to one of the uprights in the cabinet.

The resulting noise reduction is better than I expected. I can now sleep at night despite the 40mm fans on the two 19″ rackmount switches whirring away. It’s far from totally silent, but the elimination of reflection of the sounds inside the cabinet has greatly reduced the amplitude of the eminating noise, which escapes from the top of the cabinet. I have attempted to add the top to the cabinet which again drastiacally reduced noise, but it caused the temperature inside to rise significantly and I discovered that the top of the cabinet is not square enough to mount the top without modification.