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My wife and I recently moved into a new apartment. We've had it for just a few days.

When our internet company came to hook up our landline, I had them hook it into one of our bedrooms and set up my home office.

Now my wife wants to set up her home office. She'd like an Ethernet cable connection off our internet router, but there isn't enough space for both of us in the one bedroom - so I'd like to feed the Ethernet cable into the adjoining bedroom.

Since we don't own the place, I want to feed this cable into the other room without causing permanent damage to the wall or door - if I need to keep my door open a small crack, that's fine, but if possible I'd like to keep it mostly shut sometimes.

How can I feed a connecting internet cable from the router in my office to the adjoining room so that my wife can have an Ethernet cable connection, while causing minimal permanent damage to the two doors and wall between the two rooms?

I'll try to upload a picture of the walls/doors later, but they essentially form a "Y" shape so that the two doors open out into the hallway of our apartment, with the bottom of the "Y" being the wall between them. The walls themselves are wood, but it's fairly thick wall, and the doors are old wooden doors. The flooring is hardwood. I'll try and get a better picture of the framework for the door later today.

Zibbobz
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3 Answers3

46

You can buy flat Ethernet cables. I'm betting you could get one under the door and still allow it to be closed.

Another option is a powerline Ethernet adapter. This is a set of modules that plug into your power outlets and allow you to transmit network signals over them. You run a patch cable from the router to a module in the same room, then plug in a second module in the room the second PC is in.

Also, if the rooms are next to each other, look around ducts, pipes that might pass through, etc. You might get lucky and find a gap big enough to fish a cable through.

Another option is to install low voltage boxes in the drywall with RJ45 jacks. Wire the jacks together, color to color, and use patch cables from the router to jack one, and from jack two to the second PC. Just leave them when you move and it will look like any other jack in the wall.

And lastly, have you considered WiFi?

donjuedo
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Sean
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If the room is adjoining, drilling a hole big enough for an Ethernet cable may not be considered "major damage". If one of my tenants asked me if they could do it I would say yes and consider it normal wear and tear, unless the hole was like 1 inch in diameter or something.

If you DO drill through a wall, make sure you don't drill into a power line; if you're unsure, it's better not to do it.

If you don't want to drill, you can get a flat cable as suggested and also run a thin plastic conduit with a cover on it. Many of them have double sided tape so you can run them around a door or along a floor and when you leave, you just pull them off the wall. The double stick tape doesn't do any major damage.

Tensigh
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If the floor in and between the two bedrooms is carpeted, you can probably push the ethernet cable into the "crack" between the carpet and wall. The cable will then run along the wall in the first bedroom, around the door jamb, along the wall in the hallway towards the second bedroom (if any), around the door jamb of the second bedroom, then along the wall to your wife's computer. Whether you can push the cable into the crack, depends on how firmly the carpet is pressing the wall and the size/shape of the ethernet cable.

Χpẘ
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