First, you cut a hole in the box...

For Thursday's week of housework project, I built a box for all of my networking gear.

The impetus came from the giant mass of cables and power cords that lives in one of the corners in my office. The cable outlet is in the middle of the wall, and so I've got RG-6 running directly out from the wall and then along the baseboard into one of the corners. And since we have hardwood everywhere, the cable doesn't lay nicely along the baseboard.

So I decided a while ago that I needed to move the whole mess into the attic. We have insulation and bugs in the attic, so all of this gear needed to go in a box.

...and here it is. It's got my new non-sucking cheapass Belkin access point and a power strip—and enough room for the alluded-to suckass Linksys AP (for just media streaming on another channel) and the cable modem.

And I got to use up a whole bunch of my spare wood paneling, too. So that's pretty sweet.

All that's left is to finish mounting the cooling fan, build a screen for the top, mount an outlet up in the attic, and rerun a bunch of cables to the new box.