Most of the houses we wire around Norfolk, Brant and Oxford were built long before anyone thought about network cable. Farmhouses from the 1890s. Brick bungalows from the fifties. Places that grew an addition in three different decades, each with its own framing and its own surprises.
The question we get every fall is some version of the same one: can this house actually be wired, or is it a lost cause?
It can almost always be wired. The real question is which walls we can get into, and whether the result is worth what that access costs.
The house sets the price, not the cable
A box of Cat6 is cheap. Getting it from the panel area to the far corner of the second floor is the job, and that part changes enormously from house to house.
Open basement, accessible attic, interior partitions that run straight up: that is a good day, and the drops go in quickly. Now take a 1910 farmhouse with plaster and lath, balloon framing with fire blocking at odd heights, a finished basement ceiling and no attic access above the back addition. Same cable, same length, three times the labour.
This is why we do not quote house cabling by the foot over the phone. We walk it first, look at the basement joists and the attic hatch, and then we put numbers on paper.
The three paths we look for first
Almost every run in an older home takes one of three routes.
Up from the basement is the best case. If the basement ceiling is open, we can get to the exterior walls and most interior partitions on the main floor with very little patching.
Down from the attic covers the second floor the same way, when there is a real attic and the insulation is not blown in so deep that the top plates have disappeared.
Outside and back in is the one people do not expect, and it is often the cleanest answer in a brick house. We run outdoor-rated cable down the exterior in a discreet path, then punch back in low on the far wall. It sounds crude. Done properly, with a sealed penetration, it is invisible from the street and it avoids opening three ceilings.
What we try hardest to avoid is fishing through finished walls on both floors of a plaster house. That is where the hours go.
How many drops, and where
Two per room is a common answer in a new build. In a retrofit we spend the budget differently, because every drop carries a real cost.
We start with the access point locations, because those do the most work for the fewest runs. One well-placed wired access point per floor beats any amount of mesh, for reasons we went through in wired vs mesh access points. Then the office, because that is where people notice latency. Then the main TV, and any camera or doorbell location we know is coming.
Everything else can wait. We would rather leave a pull string in a wall than run four drops into a spare bedroom nobody uses.
Old phone and coax wiring is rarely the shortcut
People ask whether we can reuse the old telephone or cable jacks. Sometimes the location is useful. The wire itself almost never is, and pulling new cable back along an old run only works when whoever installed it was gentle with the staples.
Where a room is genuinely unreachable, there are honest alternatives that use the wiring already in the house. We compared them in powerline, MoCA or running cable. They are a compromise and we say so, but a compromise beats a dead zone.
When an in-wall access point saves a run
If a room has one usable drop and needs both Wi-Fi and a couple of wired ports, an in-wall access point is often the tidier answer. UniFi's wall-mount models sit in a standard box, take power over that single cable, and hand back Ethernet ports on the face plate. The U7 In-Wall includes a small 2.5 GbE switch built in.
That is one cable doing three jobs. In an older home, where the second cable is the expensive one, it changes the math on a whole floor.
The code and safety parts
Low-voltage cable still has rules attached to it in Ontario. Section 60 of the Canadian Electrical Code governs communication cabling in buildings: separation from power conductors, restrictions on running cable through ducts and plenum spaces, and cables that cross a fire separation have to be firestopped properly on the way through.
None of this is exotic. It is the difference between a job that passes a later inspection and one that quietly does not. Older houses also throw the occasional live knob-and-tube circuit at us, and when we find one we stop and tell you, because that is an electrician's call before our cable goes near it.
What it costs
Our installed Cat6 drops start at $195 each, Cat6A from $245. Which one you want depends on the run and what goes on the end of it, and we laid out the trade-off in Cat6 vs Cat6A. Difficult access, patching and panel work is technician labour at $135 an hour locally, $150 in the Hamilton, Burlington and Oakville area.
Homes close to us in Norfolk have no visit minimum. Further out it applies: visits 31 to 60 minutes away start at $395, and past an hour, which covers most of the Hamilton and Oakville side, $595. That is not a travel fee. It is the floor the day's work counts toward, so a morning of drops absorbs it entirely.
Every job is quoted in writing before anyone drills anything. If the honest answer is that three of your five drops are not worth the ceiling repair, we will say so during the walkthrough rather than after.
What we would do
Wire the spine of the house and stop. Access points on each floor, the office, the TV wall, the camera runs you already know about, all landing in one tidy spot with power and a small switch. Our structured cabling and network work is built around that idea, and the network closet checklist shows what the finished end should look like. Everything else is an easy add later, once the hard part is in the walls.
If you have an older place and you are tired of moving the router around, get in touch and we will come look at the basement and the attic before we quote anything.
Sources
- UniFi Wall-Mount WiFi Access Points - Ubiquiti
- Guide to the Canadian Electrical Code, Section 60: Electrical Communications Systems - Electrical Industry Canada
- Access Point U7 In-Wall - Ubiquiti Store
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