Wiring Cleanup - Phase 1

When I built my house close to 20 years ago, I wanted to be prepared for everything, and because of that, I wired everything - did I say everything!!! Even today, I wire most things where possible while having the best Meraki networking and wireless gear. I was no wiring guru, but I was not exactly a novice either. In my early days of network engineering and professional services, I learned about wiring and cable termination. When I bought my house, I ran plenty of cables - RG6 for TV, RG59 for video surveillance (it was 20 years ago), whole home audio, and over 48 cat5e drops. At the time, I wanted this to look good, so after some research, I selected Leviton structured wiring solutions. After terminating all my connections in the Levition, it looked good - but not great. Next, what I found shortly after that was a lot of limitations with structured wiring, such as you can not mount large switches and routers in there, so basically, I had to patch from inside the panel to outside the panel - It got ugly fast! Take a look below;

I completely forgot to take a picture before, so this is shortly after I started. But ugly - The cabinet was packed, yet all the patches came in and out to it. So it was time to do it right now - I'm still kicking myself for not just using 19 racks with std patch panels—time to fix my mistake. With the family gone for the weekend, I began by re-terminating everything onto 19-inch patch panels. However, these were unique patch panels that used keystone jacks. Using keystones jacks was extraordinary in many different ways. First, I had room to work as I terminated the individual jacks. Second I would never have a problem where a port on the panel breaks, and now I have to work around it - My OCD brain does not like that. Lastly, it helped keep the network running as I could keep port downtime to less than 5 minutes. Uptime did not matter as everyone was gone, but I realized I could have done it with the entire family home with little interruption. 

After a full day of re-terminating all the cables and moving my core network equipment over the panel, I was finally done with Phase 1. 

While this still looks like a mess, it is better than I had before. But it's only phase 1. Phase 2, Planned for next weekend, will hopefully add some cable management and updated patch cables. Then, as time permits, I may tackle phase 3, including rack mounting and cleaning up all home audio and video capabilities!