diagrams.net<\/a>, I downloaded images of each of my devices, and drew interconnect lines so I could reproduce my setup in the future.<\/p>\nUnfortunately, I didn\u2019t add enough detail to the diagram way back then. The tricky part is not just plugging in USB-shaped cables into USB-shaped holes. For example, while the Elgato Wave XLR mic interface can use a USB-C cable from the Thunderbolt hub, that same USB-C cable can\u2019t be used for any of the other devices I plug into the Thunderbolt hub. One of the hardest parts to get right was connecting the CalDigit Dock to the OWC hub. Each of them has one Thunderbolt port that shows a little computer symbol on it. I never documented which devices go into each of those ports.<\/p>\n
Obviously, neither of those ports connects to my computer directly because this whole mess is to be able to live the one-cable lifestyle on my MacBook Pro. I thought for a while that maybe one Thunderbolt cable went between the two “computer” Thunderbolt ports, but that was wrong, too.<\/p>\n
I figured out it was incorrectly connected when my mic and headphones plugged into the Wave XLR weren\u2019t even recognized by my system. I broke out draw.io again with the diagram, studied the problem, fixed it, and then edited the diagram a whole bunch to make it much more specific for next time.<\/p>\nNew and Improved Desktop Diagram<\/br>Note: I had to flip the OWC Hub upside down to get the detail of the cabling added nicely<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nI have a super old set of bookshelf Logitech speakers that connect to a subwoofer. When setting those up, I got them left\/right reversed, of course, but eventually got that sorted. While I followed my careful diagram to plug the subwoofer into the UPS, I’ve just discovered I didn’t connect it to the bookshelf speakers, so it’s not yet functioning. Not a big deal, just one more thing to figure out and add to my diagram for future me.<\/p>\n
After I got my studio rebuilt, I stayed up late removing every single piece of glassware and china out of the china cabinet in the dining room, where I would instruct the workers to start first thing the next morning. My plan was that while they worked on the dining room, I would disassemble Lindsay\u2019s old room, which is where the real network of the house lives. I would also tell them that my studio was not<\/em> to have anything moved into it because I didn\u2019t want them flinging furniture around anywhere near that Pro Display XDR!<\/p>\nSteve got up at 5 AM and removed all of his electronics equipment from his den, including his Mac Studio, Studio Display, LG 5K display, and his mic, so he was ready for them to remove all of his furniture by the time they arrived. The dining room and Steve’s den would be enough to entertain them for a few hours.<\/p>\n
However, the next morning, while I was downstairs talking to one of the three guys about my carefully thought-out plan, another guy ran upstairs and started disassembling Lindsay\u2019s room \u2026 moving things into my studio! By the time I caught on to what was happening, they\u2019d actually flipped some of the furniture in my studio upside down on top of the bed!<\/p>\n
To suggest I freaked out is to dramatically understate the situation. I told them they were forbidden to go into my studio, and that everything had to go in our bedroom. They whined, but they managed to do it.<\/p>\n
Lindsay\u2019s Room<\/h2>\n As the guys started tearing down the dining room and Steve\u2019s room, I was in a race against time to get Lindsay\u2019s room disassembled. Her room hosts the following:<\/p>\n
\nSynology<\/li>\n OWC RAID Drive attached to Synology<\/li>\n Mac mini with an elderly but functional 27\u201d Cinema Display<\/li>\n Gateway Eero router<\/li>\n 16-port Ethernet Switch<\/li>\n Hue Hub<\/li>\n Euphy Home Hub<\/li>\n Flic Hub<\/li>\n Ring hub for our alarm system<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nAs I’ve already mentioned, it\u2019s very important to document how things are plugged in before disassembling. I took a photo of the complete and utter ratsnest of cables going into the back of the cabinet \u2026 mostly for the comedy.<\/p>\nImportant to Document Before Unplugging<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nBut seriously, the other thing I did was draw another diagram of the UPS managing all of those devices. The Ring, Synology, Ethernet switch, RAID array, Mac mini, and Eero router all made the cut for the Battery + Surge side.<\/p>\nUPS Diagram for the Servers and Such<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nWhen it came time to plug everything back in, again, Kepler the Good Dog was even more helpful. The poor thing was banished to the back yard for most of each day, so when we let him back in, he felt that he really needed to up his supervisory game. I was running Ethernet cables into the switch when he rolled on his back between me and the switch, looked up at it from underneath, and blocked my arm from getting past my knee to the switch.<\/p>\nNow Kepler is Really Helping<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nBecause this wasn\u2019t stressful enough, I decided to upgrade our network during the recarpeting adventure. I think you\u2019ll agree it was actually good timing when I tell you how this happened.<\/p>\n
A few weeks ago, we were out visiting Kyle & Nikki and their kids (our Houston grandkids). Our good friends David Roth and his wife Jennifer also live in Houston, so we made time to meet up with them for lunch. We were nerding out during lunch, as one does, and David told us that he\u2019d recently swapped out his entire network with Ubiquity equipment.<\/p>\n
If you haven\u2019t heard of Ubiquity, I like to describe it as networking for people who secretly wish they were system admins. From what I understand, the equipment is rock solid, and the software gives you all kinds of fun controls and graphical ways of viewing and controlling your network. It\u2019s also pretty pricey, but everyone who has gone down this path is very enthusiastic about how great it is.<\/p>\n
I knew that David had previously installed all Eero Pro 7s in this house, so when he was done gushing about how much fun it was to play with Ubiquity, I asked him what he\u2019d done with his Eeros. I remembered that they were the Pro 7s models, which are the top-of-the-line ones that I\u2019d been too cheap to buy when I replaced all of mine with Eero Pro 6Es. David explained that the 7 Pros were just sitting on a shelf, and then said the most beautiful words he\u2019s ever said to me. He said, \u201cDo you want them?\u201d<\/p>\n
Seriously. And he refused any money for them. The Eero Pro 7s have come down a bit in price since I looked at them, but this is a THOUSAND DOLLARS worth of equipment he gave us!!! We managed to cram all four of them into our luggage for the trip home.<\/p>\n
Now back to the carpeting story. Disassembling Lindsay\u2019s room meant unplugging the Gateway Eero anyway (taking down our precious network), so I figured that was a perfect time to swap in the Eero Pro 7. Eero makes this so easy. You tap on Add a new device, and one of the options is to replace an existing Eero. It tells you to unplug the old one, plug in the new one, and hit next. Then it looks for the new Eero, and when it finds it, you\u2019re done.<\/p>\n
But it didn\u2019t find the new one. I tried a couple of times, and then broke down and typed in the serial number of the new Eero, like an animal. And then I saw terrible words in the app, encircled in red:<\/p>\n
\n This eero device is already registered. Please have the previous owner remove this eero from their network.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\nBad David!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nWell, that\u2019s a fine kettle of fish! I texted David a screenshot of what I was seeing with no explanation, and in exactly 3 minutes, he wrote back the one word: \u201cDone\u201d. How’s that for customer service? I tapped on Add, and this time, the Eero app immediately found the new Eero Pro 7, and all of my devices were connected as they should be. I didn’t have to do anything to reconfigure the new Gateway Eero. I couldn\u2019t have been happier, except for that one egregious error David made, of course.<\/p>\n
As we disassembled and reassembled each room, we replaced 3 more Eero Pro 6Es with Pro 7s with no trouble at all. It really is a testament to how good the software is from Eero. I mean, it\u2019s no Ubiquity, but it\u2019s the right tool for me.<\/p>\n
DVD Cabinet Like a Spreadsheet<\/h2>\n One of the easier tasks during this project was emptying our DVDs from their cabinet into boxes. But even that had a tech angle. Our DVD cabinet is 7-shelves tall. There are shelves in both doors and the main part of the cabinet. That center portion has a vertical piece separating the left and right sides. The problem to be solved was how to get the nearly 300 DVDs back into the cabinet with the same basic structure we have right now.<\/p>\n
For example, we know to look in the bottom rows for Christmas movies, series like Pirates of the Caribbean, and the Die Hard movies (which are also Christmas movies) are above that. Steve\u2019s icky movies like Apocalypse Now, District 9, and Predator are over on the right side, with our James Bond collection below that. The top row is all Marvel movies, which we both like. My sappy movies like Driving Miss Daisy and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days are on the upper left, with Pixar and Star Trek below that.<\/p>\nLook! It’s a Spreadsheet!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nI wonder how many of you would think of the solution we came up with. I decided to view it as a spreadsheet, of course! The cabinet is 7 rows tall and 4 columns wide. All we had to do was pull out the top left section of DVDs, drop them as a stack into a box, and put a piece of blue tape on it labeled R1C1. Grab the next one across, and label it R1C2. Rinse and repeat until we get to R7C4. It worked beautifully.<\/p>\nStacks of DVDs<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nI have to say, when you put two engineering brains together, you come up with great solutions like this.<\/p>\n
Bottom Line<\/h2>\n The bottom line is that having new carpeting is awesome, and it really doesn\u2019t take all that long to get it done. The price hadn\u2019t gone up that much since the last time we did this, fifteen or so years ago, which was surprising. Unsurprisingly, my back isn\u2019t as young as it was fifteen years ago.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve spoken at length about how helpful Kepler the Good Dog was during this strenuous adventure, but what about Ada and Grace? It turns out cats aren\u2019t as helpful as you might think. Ada wasn\u2019t bad, mostly performing inspections, like when she crawled into the china cabinet to make sure I\u2019d removed all of the bud vases.<\/p>\nAda Goes on Inspection Duty<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nBut Grace merely assumed that all efforts were to make cozy sleeping spots for her. She perched sleepily on top of loads of blankets, pillows, and comforters, and couldn\u2019t have been happier. She did not raise a toe to help!<\/p>\nGrace Can’t Be Bothered to Help<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nI\u2019ll close by saying that our new carpet is yummy and soft and squishy. Steve may have captured a video of me doing a carpet angel to illustrate how happy I am with the new carpet.<\/p>\n\nCarpet Angel<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nNow, where does that darn subwoofer plug in?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We just had our entire house recarpeted this week, and holy cow was that a lot of work. It\u2019s like moving \u2026 but not. While it is tempting to give you all the details of things like putting two bookcases’ worth of books and photo albums into our bathtub, instead, I’m going to talk about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":34979,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[147],"tags":[5246,3490,7713,3458,1158],"class_list":["post-34959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog-posts","tag-carpet","tag-diagrams","tag-recarpet","tag-servers","tag-ups"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Living-room-with-dining-room-in-itA-1040x520-1.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34959"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34959\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34982,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34959\/revisions\/34982"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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