My wife's father passed away last December. We've been cleaning out his house, and have decided to buy it from the Estate. (It's a reasonably short distance away, better school district, etc.) The cleanup has been... interesting.
I've been reverse engineering what my brother-in-law did with the house wiring. If you've ever turned over a prototype circuit board, you may have some idea what I'm up against. There are wires everywhere. The first round involved pulling up a phone line that was duct-taped across the kitchen floor to feed the (since removed) Tivo on the far wall. From there, another phone line ran into a hole drilled in the corner, then under the house and up through a hole in the living room, to feed a second Tivo. As far as I can tell, each of these ran off of a separate satellite feed; there are two cables in the back yard running to a single dish mounted on a fence, but there are mounting holes for a second dish. There's also standard cable. (When my daughter wanted to watch cartoons at Grandpa's, it used to be a 5 minute exercise in punching buttons on 4 separate remote controls.)
To get TV signals into the upstairs, lines were run under the house and up the other side, then in through holes drilled in the walls. Phone lines followed similar routes. DSL came along later, adding more holes to get ethernet into various rooms of the house, again by drilling holes through the walls and running Cat5 out, down, under, up, and then in through more holes. The only rooms untouched by hole punching were the bathrooms. I found a half dozen unused holes in the outside wall, which I assume were abandoned experiments.
I'm not finished, but I've already pulled up lifetime supply of various types of wires, cables, extension cords, and power strips. Meanwhile, the spare wireless access point I plugged in to the DSL modem is working just fine.
Next up is learning how to patch drywall to repair the internal damage. The plumbing is shot, but we'll let the pros handle that.
