Plan

Fail to prepare, prepare to fail.

I like this expression. It makes a lot of sense and I tend to live life with this in mind, both at work and in my day to day life as a Dad, a homemaker, a husband and a football coach. Preparation is massively important. I'm an Electronic engineer by trade and any project that I work on always involves preparation and pre planning. Then when it comes to the job, everything runs smoothly, with no surprises.

Bedrooms

Any of you regular readers will know that I've three sons and although we've a five bedroom house, the boys share a room as they like being together. That will change soon though, as our eldest son is almost ten, and he's going to want his own bedroom soon. No issues there, the toy room can be converted into his bedroom and we already have a bed in there.

The problem will arise when the other two want their own bedroom however, as currently we have spare bedrooms upstairs. One is my home office and the other is a room for visitors and family to stay in.

The days of my home office may well be limited and we want to always have a guest room for friends and family to stay in, so a plan was needed and I came up with one.

The Shed

We have a shed that is semi plummed and could conceivably be turned into a Granny flat.

We may do that some day, but for now it would be enough to turn it into a work office. What does one need to work from home, above all else? That's right, the internet. With that in mind, we needed to run the internet from the house out to the shed.

There was a few potential ways to accomplish this. One was to use power line extenders, which utilise a houses internal wiring. I tried this, but the shed is too far away and the signal was not strong enough.

Another option would be to order a new connection from our service provider, but that would likely come with a hefty additional fee. The last option was to run in a fibre cable myself.

Time to get planning...

Tarmac

It just so happens that we are getting our drive tarmacked this month, so if ever there was a time to run fibre cables from the house to the shed, now was the time.

Planning Phase

Site Survey

The site survey was not too hard to organise, as I live here! So I measured out approximate distances and added 40% to be sure, as it's always handy to have slack when it comes to fibre, in case I ever needed to move the mini rack that would house the switch and Wifi access points.

Bill of Materials

I would need two mini racks, fibre cable, conduit to protect the fibre in the ground and I decided to run Cat 6E cable also. In the end I ordered two 85 metre Cat 6E cables and 2 LC connectorised fibre pairs, as you’ll see from the bill of materials below.