Cat5e everywhere. Every room. The garage. The bathroom (don't ask — there's a reason and it's a good one). Every cable home-run to a patch panel in the utility room where there is now a small rack that my husband describes as "too much" and I describe as "a good start."

What I Actually Did

Pulled about 800 feet of Cat5e over a weekend. Ran conduit in the garage because future-me will want to upgrade without crawling through walls again. Put a 24-port patch panel in a 6U open-frame rack. Added a small managed switch that I'll write about separately because the VLAN configuration alone is a whole post.

Every run got tested with a proper cable tester. Every run passed on the first try because I've done this enough times to know that cutting corners on termination is how you spend three hours debugging a "slow internet" complaint that's actually a bad crimp on port 7.

The Part About the Bathroom

Fine. The bathroom has a TV now. The TV is a project screen for when I'm doing hardware work on the bench next to it. Yes the bench is in what was originally described as a "guest bathroom" when we bought the house. No there are no guests who need that bathroom. Yes this is a satisfactory resolution to the situation.

What I'd Do Differently

Nothing about the physical install. I'd do the rack layout differently — I put the patch panel at the top and the switch below it and now the patch cables are going the wrong direction for how I naturally work. Minor. Fixable. Will fix it eventually and not tell anyone I moved things around.

The Point

Your house network is infrastructure. Treat it like infrastructure. Don't run Wi-Fi for things that can be wired. Don't use powerline adapters. Don't daisy-chain consumer switches. Do it right once and stop thinking about it.